Julie Halston
During the go-go 80's, before Julie Halston became the doyenne of downtown, she was a precious metals analyst even further south. “I took cabs two blocks,” she remembers of her Wall Street days, “I was living in Perry Ellis suits.” But then Julie met Chuck—the name Tony-nominated playwright Charles Busch answered to back then—and Chuck invited Julie into his runaway Off-Broadway monster Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Twenty-five years later, she's still at it. When she wrapped her summer run in the fast-talking hit Twentieth Century opposite Alec Baldwin and Anne Heche, she told me she was going home to clean her house. Cut to fall, when she came to the rescue of playwright William Hamilton, replacing Nora Dunn for the world premiere of his racial farce White Chocolate and slipped into the three pairs of shoes formerly occupied by pal Jackie Hoffman in the Tony-winning musical Hairspray. And while there's no word if her house ever got clean, it sure is packed every night.
When did you become this uptown girl?
You know what I think turned it for me? Gypsy. Working with Sam Mendes on a very prestigious project with a Broadway legend like Bernadette Peters did it. The strippers were a very big highlight in that show. I mean, there were so many highlights, but that turned it around for me. I've been very lucky to work with great writers like Charles Busch, but even Charles has taken a leap uptown as a lot of us move along.
I loved that your stripper wasn't anything you wouldn't have done downtown. It's like the mountain came to Mohammad.
I've not heard that yet, but it's really smart. The one thing that I love about Sam [Mendes, director of Gypsy] is that he loves originality and does not care where it comes from: downtown, from Missouri, from under a rock. He's interested in originality and that's how he casts. That's his genius.
I don't think I've ever seen you not steal a scene.
Charles Busch gave me the confidence and said do what you feel like here. He gave all of us permission in that theater company, Theater-in-Limbo, to be hambonious. And if it didn't work, they'd say, okay that didn't work. Or if it didn't work in that scene, but it worked and was funny, they'd find ways for it to work elsewhere in the play. Their main thrust was always to be funny, and I think Charles gave me the confidence to trust comedic instincts. So that's the scene-stealing thing. We were allowed—all of us—to do it, as long as we didn't scene steal too much from Charles. But if it worked, we were given permission.
Yes, it's interesting that you bring that up. I do coach privately and I'm very interested in teaching. Ultimately I probably will be a teacher in my old age, not for many years yet. But we all came up in a very interesting time. It was a culturally interesting for the city, for gay people, for big-voiced, loud-mouthed women, you know what I mean? Fag hags, basically fag hags. Remember, in the early 80s, that wasn't even a term people used. Madonna helped bring that about, Cyndi Lauper too. So it was a very specific time in our cultural history. I agree that this kind of performance and sensibility is special and has a heritage and a future. What's interesting is that, in a way, it all led up to Hairspray. The show, in many ways, is the culmination of that downtown sensibility taken to a mainstream, but what will be interesting now that Hairspray is the kind of thing your mom goes to, what then is the alternative? And I don't know yet what that is. For a long time, our heritage was just survival because we lost a lot of friends to AIDS. I know that in the early 90s, I was so depressed it was hard to get my own self going again, let alone thinking about what I'm going to bring to the future. That has been tackled and we are all in the swing. Luckily, a lot or people are living.
Well, I'm living for you in Hairspray. You're playing Penny's mom, that dodge ball Nazi and the prison matron. How do you approach so many characters?
First of all, it's hard to come into a show when someone like Jackie Hoffman has so made them identified with her. That's very difficult. So what we decided was to really make them three very distinct characters and I went back to my Charles Busch roots, which means go to the 1930s movies and look at those prototypes. So for Prudy Pingleton I am doing Joan Crawford, which is hysterical because there's even a reference to her tying up Penny. When I do the gym teacher, I'm doing a sort of Charlotte Greenwood/Mary Wicks character and the prison matron is an Ida Lupino/Anne Revere take. She's a very severe character. And then we go back to being Joan, but happier Joan. This is very different from what Jackie was doing because Jackie was so hilarious. So you can't really top a Jackie Hoffman, you have to do something completely different.
Do you get to ad lib like Jackie did?
Yes, and I do the same thing as I go through the audience. My favorite one is turning to the person I've landed on and saying, “Oh, you thought these were the good seats, didn't you, darling?” It's all very Joan. Everything is very Joan.
As it should be. So how do you keep the spark in a show that's been up for a while?
The kids. And Hairspray continues to be this incredibly high energy, high octane kind of a show, but when you're coming into a show that's a couple years old there's a tendency to say, “Oh boy, this is going to be dreary.” And it's so not. It continues to be ebullient.
Jackie always used to joke about Jerry [Mitchell, the show's choreographer] placing large objects in front of her whenever she had to dance, but I can't imagine you having that same problem as you strike me as so continental.
Well, that's very kind of you. All I can say is I didn't have a breakdown [Laughs]. Ms. Hoffman apparently had a breakdown, but I can understand why the funny ladies get a little tense when they hear words like “combination.” In a way, I sort of got used to it in Gypsy, but we're the funny ladies, we don't do the five, six, seven, eight. Unless eight gets a laugh.
So how long have you signed on for?
Well, right now I'm here for six months, which is a great way to have a nice winter, and we'll go from there. I'm at a lovely time in my life where I seem to work steadily all the time, so hopefully that will continue to happen. I do have some ideas about spring. I might be doing an independent film. And also, Charles [Busch] and I are cooking something up right now, but that will also be uptown.
Well, again, it's a long story, but I will try and make it terse and brief [Laughs]. I had a friend who told me he knew this guy who did this one-man-show and he would assume identities of women and men. I thought that's the last thing I wanna see. And that same friend was always telling Charles Busch, "Oh, I know this girl, she's so funny, she's loud and really fun." And Charles was like, "That sounds like the last person I want to meet." So another friend got me to do a benefit. At that time there were many young men dying in San Francisco from GRID, which of course turned out to be AIDS, who couldn't pay their hospital bills. I would tell stories about my childhood. It was terrible. It was a terrible show, but Charles happened to be in the audience. He loved what I looked like. He loved what I was wearing. I looked very Kay Thompson at that time. I was wearing this fabulous white jumpsuit and big hoop earrings. I had short platinum hair with big lashes and he said, “I don't really think she's very good, but she's great looking.” He talked to me after the show. We liked each other immediately and found we adored all of the same people. Hayley Mills, Julie Christie…
Hayley Mills is major!
Totally major. And can I just say, has not gotten her due yet. So her, Julie Christie, The Beatles, all the Beatles' girlfriends, the whole 60s thing, Twiggy, and then the biggie, Jean Shrimpton. Once we discovered we were both madly in love with Jean Shrimpton, Charles said we had to be friends. Later on, when he came back to New York, he asked me to come to his one-man-show at this terrible hole in the wall. I came and kept bringing all my friends because I loved the show. He kept saying, “Well, she might not be able to act very well, but she's so popular and great at the box office, I'll put her in one of my shows.” And he did. I brought all these people and guess what? I was good. Once I had friends in the audience, I was one of those people. I was very Liza: Love me! If you love me, I'll be good. And he turned to the company and said, “She's got a lot of friends and she's good when they love her, let's keep her around.” So they did and it worked out.
It's incredible to come out of this Daryl Hannah Wall Street existence and then starve. It's a whole difference proposition than if you'd just been starving all along.
Yes, it is. It was always what I wanted, but I was always terribly afraid of being the starving artist. One of the dearest members of our company, Meghan Robinson, died of AIDS. It's hard for me to talk about her without getting emotional, but she did beg me on her deathbed to please be an artist because she believed in me. And what was I going to do? She really believed in me and said I know you can do this. You need to believe in yourself and it was obviously one of those transforming moments where you say I'm going to do this. When you see all your friends dying and your world changing in such a terrible way, you think am I going to not do what I want because why, my apartment isn't fully decorated? You know what I mean? I just lost one of my best friends; I'll deal with the couch later. And so it was a very transforming moment and I'm very glad I did it.
You've played muse for so many people. Quickly, let's go through a few quickly; Barbara Walters style. Todd Haynes.
I did Dottie Gets Spanked with Todd and have very fond memories. He was so kind and so patient. We filmed in Long Island City in three days and after we wrapped I was going home in a car and the World Trade Center was bombed. I'll never forget it; it was the first time, in 1993. I remember being absolutely stunned. The cab driver said we had to go another way because it was, you know…
I know. Okay, Harvey Fierstein.
Harvey is one of my dearest friends. We knew each other from the 80s because I certainly went to see Torch Song Trilogy downtown like everybody, but we kind of circulated around each other for a number of years. We didn't really hang together. He thought I was funny, I thought he was funny. Well, I thought he was more than funny, I thought he was the genius that he is, but we didn't really get close until we did this pilot for CBS together. It was never made into a series or anything, but we did this horrible pilot called Those Two. It was the precursor to Will & Grace but of course, we were not Will and Grace. That's when we became very close friends. You know, Harvey is an iconic figure in our culture. And I always sort of forget that he is iconic. He walks down the street and people come up to him and tell him he changed their life. I know him as Harvey, but he is sort of a personal hero and a great friend. He's amazing.
I remember seeing Charles Busch come fetch you at Gypsy one night after he finished up at Taboo so you could walk home together. It was so cute. You reminded me of two school kids. We totally still are those kids. You know, he changed my life. I've never forgotten that and I hope I never do. I hope he feels that I am a big part of his life too. But we do get together and we are kind of like schoolgirls. I think there's a part of Charles, and I know there's a part of me, that's still a little amazed. It's kind of like, "Oh my God, we're in show business and oh my God, it's kind of, like, working." It's like the guy and the girl that sat on the phone talking about Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton giggling like schoolgirls still exists. He brings that kind of enthusiasm, and I hope I do too because once you don't, then leave the business. You're no longer interested in the art; you're basically maintaining a persona that doesn't really have any enthusiasm for life. That's when you sink into not only bad work, but also alcoholism and drug addiction. You've lost that spark.
Oh, well, you know, that means Law and Order, Law and Order: SVU, Criminal Intent.
Oh! I thought you meant you were on every episode. I thought of going back to review. Where's Julie?
It's like Alfred Hitchcock.
When I saw you at The Book of Liz, you'd just finished playing a homicidal gallery owner.
Ah yes, that was Criminal Intent.
It certainly was. I loved that episode.
Well apparently there are a few actors who have not been on Law and Order and now they wear it like a badge of merit. Like “I'm one of the few actors that hasn't.”
Hasn't what, nailed a Law and Order audition? Please. You have to do the Law and Orders.
I absolutely think you do. To me, there's SAG, Equity, AFTRA and Law and Order.
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See Julie Halston in Hairspray at the Neil Simon Theatre, 250 West 52nd Street. Click for tickets and more information.
