Charles Busch, the acclaimed male actor, Tony-nominated playwright, and most recently ebullient memoirist, has pondered his bed could make a good stage. At his Greenwich Village duplex last month, he noticed that the arched entrance to his dazzling white boudoir resembles a proscenium.
The space is decorated in a 1940s style by Dorothy Draper, an interior designer known for her sensitivity to modern baroque. It’s the kind of place, Busch noted, that makes you think of Gene Tierney as the chic advertising executive (and alleged murder victim) in the glamorous 1944 film noir Laura.
However, the show Busch wants to put on here would be a production of Lucille Fletcher’s radio play Sorry, Wrong Number, in which a nervous, bedridden rich woman overhears her own murder plot over a crossed phone line. The role was memorably played by Barbara Stanwyck in the 1948 film.
“I really should do it before I’m too old,” said Busch, who was a few weeks under 69 at the time. With slicked-back, graying hair and a mandarin-collared shirt and pants (drag is for the stage), he resembled an unconventional college professor.
He figured an audience of 12 people could be squeezed into the hallway. Busch himself, presumably in a luxurious peignoir, would “wait in bed like Jessica Chastain,” who sat onstage in a wordless prologue in the recent Broadway revival of “A Doll’s House.”
Busch also played the role from the start, “chocolate-eating and neurotic.” He plucked the air with impatient, fidgeting fingers. Suddenly a doomed, desperate invalid seemed to appear before me. I felt dizzy, oscillating between shuddering and giggling.
I had arrived just 10 minutes earlier at Busch, whose Leading Lady: A Memoir of a Most Unusual Boy comes out Tuesday. But much of the essence of this man playing women was already established: the encyclopedic frame of reference, the evocation of a sparklingly elegant Manhattan, the evocation of a decades-long parade of actresses, and most importantly, the dizzying Judy-and-Mickey-style excitement, a to put on a show.
Those elements are evident in Leading Lady, a book reminiscent of Act One — Moss Hart’s classic portrayal of a sentimental apprenticeship in the theater — but with many more wig and costume changes, as well as a gleeful performance in Detour, Nine Months worked as a rent boy for a long time. And of course another list of famous names as supporting players, including Liza Minnelli, Carol Channing, Angela Lansbury and Kim Novak.
Although the book took 14 years to write (“I’ve written a lot of plays in between, darling”), the autobiography seems like a natural fit for a man who says, “As I live an experience, I turn it into a narrative .” Assembled as a time-consuming mosaic of memories and self-analysis, Leading Lady tells the rise of a motherless boy who discovered that he was only really good on stage when he dressed in women’s clothes.
“When I play a male role, I’m fine,” he said, “but there’s someone else who could do it better.” But as a male actress, I have a pretty healthy ego.”
Busch’s extensive resume includes screenplays (his film with Carl Andress, “The Sixth Reel,” in which he appears in and out of drag, opens in New York this month), national cabaret tours and the authorship of a hit Broadway comedy. “The story of the allergist’s wife.”
But as the title of the memoir suggests, Busch is, above all, a leading lady. In his self-starring plays – inspired by the female-centric melodramas of old Hollywood – he is usually lavishly hung and clothed, picking out gestures and phrases from the likes of Stanwyck, Jean Harlow, Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford. These features coalesce into a single, allusive portrait, usually of a strong, fabulously dressed woman in danger.
John Epperson, Busch’s longtime friend and, as the great Lypsinka, his colleague in the downtown cross-dressing pantheon, sees their work as part of a tradition of live performance dating back to role models such as Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, which presciently blurred the boundaries between genres and genders. It was a sensibility that took new forms four decades ago in East Village bars like the Pyramid Club and the Limbo Lounge, the birthplace of Busch’s seminal work “Vampire Lesbians of Sodom.” “As someone once said to me, ‘Watch the absurdities in the culture,'” Epperson said. “I think I already did! And that’s what he does, in his own unique way.”
Staged off-Broadway with minimal budget and maximum ingenuity, Busch’s plays typically lived up to their fragrant titles – “Vampire Lesbians” (which ran off-Broadway for five years in the mid-1980s), “The Lady in Question ‘, ‘Die Mommie Die!’, ‘The Divine Sister’ and most recently ‘The Confession of Lily Dare’, which aired in New York just before the pandemic.
At first they’re just kidding. Marked by a mixture of sincere affection and amused distance, they reflect the experience of watching the films that inspired them. It’s an approach that has allowed Busch to maintain a unique position in the increasingly crowded world of drag, which has become both the stuff of prime-time entertainment (see: “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and its progeny) and a political lightning rod . With its joyful emphasis on the flamboyantly refashioned self, drag seems a perfect fun-house mirror for a culture increasingly obsessed with the illusions – and truths – of self-expression.
At the same time, men dressing as women now regularly sparks fire-breathing outrage among American conservatives. “It’s all just a trap and an illusion,” Busch said of the right-wing attacks on cross-dressing. “It’s like ‘Footloose’ or something,” he added, referring to the 1984 film about a small town where teenagers are forbidden from dancing. “It would be funny if it wasn’t so dangerous.”
For years, Busch resisted being called a drag queen; In early interviews he insisted that appearing as a woman was a purely artistic decision. It’s an attitude that now embarrasses him. “If you base your entire creative life on female imagery, it must have profound meaning,” he said.
From the moment he first put on drag for a play about conjoined twins that he wrote while studying at Northwestern University, he realized that a female role gave him a confidence and expressiveness that marked him as man was missing. Today he can happily call himself the “Godmother of Drag”. On a tour in California, two well-known stars from “RuPaul’s Drag Race” confirmed Busch’s claim to this title.
BenDeLaCreme said Busch’s performances were “like a distillation of our collective queer consciousness.” Jinkx Monsoon, who met Busch for lunch, noted that he had “all the grandeur and splendor of an opera diva, the confidence of a vaudeville clown and the grace of a first lady touring the White House.” Actor Doug Plaut, who worked with Busch on “The Sixth Reel,” considers him a surrogate mother and “the most fascinating person who ever lived.”
Busch’s own mother died of a heart attack just down the street from their home in Hartsdale, N.Y., when Busch was seven, and her absence shapes “Leading Lady.” His father, who owned a record store, was affable but inattentive, and Busch’s maternal aunt, Lillian Blum, a smart, art-loving widow who lived in Manhattan, stepped into the vacuum.
She was essentially “both my mother and my father,” he said his therapist pointed out. Busch sees her as the true heroine of his book. She died in 1999.
Busch was also very close to his sister Margaret, who was three years older than him. “We were like empaths,” he said. “We were both really good imitators. And she was the most feminine, fragile little thing, but her Jimmy Cagney had as many nuances as my Greer Garson.” She died of heart disease on July 13, and when I visited Busch a few weeks later, he was still overwhelmed by the loss.
He choked up when talking about comedian Joan Rivers, the most dominant mother figure he was drawn to throughout his adult life. “After she died, I sniffed around a few older ladies and thought I’d find another one,” he said. “But you can’t replace people.”
He actually seemed a bit drained that day, especially among the colorful portraits of him in the Chinese-red living room where we had retreated. These included Busch à la Dietrich on a sofa cushion; Busch as Sarah Bernhardt in atmospheric black and white; Busch as a bouncy human exclamation point based on the theater illustrator Al Hirschfeld; and a variety of differently made-up busts that Busch created from his own face mask.
It felt like the natural environment for someone who constantly switches between different personalities. Most of the time as we talked, his voice reminded us not of his beloved screen goddesses, but of the incredible health of the matinee idol Van Johnson next door or of the young Jimmy Stewart.
The women, however, emerged in bursts of mature commentary – the breathless drone of Bette Davis, the magnificence of Norma Shearer, or the “dry, slightly mad look” that, he said, emerged in every performance of Vivien Leigh, his favorite comes actress.
He’s thinking about finally incorporating the patrician tones of Katharine Hepburn, such as “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” into his next production, “Ibsen’s Ghost: An Irresponsible Biographical Fantasy.” It’s about the widow of the epochal playwright Henrik Ibsen, who is “sexually awakened by a sailor” and is due to arrive in New York early next year.
“It could be my farewell lecture,” he said solemnly. I reminded him that he had said the same thing about “Lily Dare” a few years ago.
“Yes, that should be my farewell lecture,” he agreed somewhat irritably. “But I don’t know.” Then he landed the requisite one-liner in a dry Eve Arden accent: “I don’t have enough hobbies.”