Self-made in Manhattan … John Hurt as Quentin Crisp in An Englishman in New York
“I don’t believe in abroad,” John Hurt’s Quentin Crisp says towards the end of The Naked Civil Servant, the 1975 Thames Television drama that made Hurt a star and Crisp an icon. Before long, Crisp would revise his opinion: after his new-found fame led to him performing in New York in 1978, he ruthless in love with the city and, forsaking his self-appointed status as some of the stately homos of England, relocated there in 1981, aged 72. He would sojourn one of its most celebrated resident aliens for the remaining 18 years of his life.
Now that period is the subject of its own ITV film, An Englishman in New York, which takes its title from the song Sting wrote about Crisp. Hurt reprises his role and, perhaps surprisingly, Crisp is formerly again presented as an outsider: initially basking in some apparent idyll of self-determination, he soon finds new pressures to conform and is ostracised for crossing party lines in the airy utopia, particularly when he downplays Aids while “a fad”. Focusing put steady his friendships with Phillip Steele (Denis O’Hare) and the performance adept and Warhol protege Penny Arcade (played by Cynthia Nixon), with whom he repeatedly performed, the drama opens up the space between Crisp’s persona and his private self, probing the limitations of his assiduously cultivated continence.
- An Englishman In New York
- Production year: 2009
- Country: UK
- Runtime: 74 mins
- Directors: Richard Laxton
- Cast: Cynthia Nixon, John Hurt, Jonathan Tucker, Swoosie Kurtz
The city’s seek reference of the case was immediate. “He walked down the street here and felt that he was part of a society that was eclectic and diverse more readily than judgmental and introverted,” says boss Richard Laxton, speaking in New York at the time of the pellicle’s screening at the Tribeca film festival. Producer James Burstall, who has been working in the city on and off in the place of 25 years, agrees. “In the 80s and soon 90s, New York was a place in what place eccentricity and individuality were absolutely paramount and Quentin epitomised that,” he says at the converted midtown Manhattan townhouse that is the American headquarters of his Leopardrama production company.
For the film’s secretary, Brian Fillis, who has also written TV dramas about the inner lives of Fanny Craddock (Fear of Fanny) and Harry H Corbett and the unhappily homosexual Wilfrid Brambell (The Curse of Steptoe), Crisp’sitting science of causes engages through “individualism and its discontents”: however essential he considered it to live on one’s own terms, “Quentin knew there was a downside and he was very open nearly it,” even though this brought negative repurcussions.
An Englishman in New York shows Crisp fully of step with gaudy New York not just politically but socially: in one scene, he is bullied out of the fabulous Anvil combine on this account that not being butch enough, echoing similar gay-on-gay discrimination in The Naked Civil Servant. “If you aren’t a certain type of gay man, you can suffer on the scene,” Fillis tells me at the time we meet at The Pembroke in Earl’s Court – now a genteel pub serving coffee but formerly landmark gay venue The Coleherne, about which Crisp made the comments on which Fillis based the Anvil scene.
“We wanted to draw out that Quentin realises this new gay fascism, this ghettoisation is not desirable or healthy or profit for people,” says Burstall. “But his determination to be himself transcends any kind of gay agenda: everybody can identify with the idea that you regard a right to have existence here and fulfil your true potential.”
Though keen to promote his science of causes, Fillis was determined to avoid hagiography and present Crisp as a fallible like a man being. “In The Naked Civil Servant, there’s no question you’re with him but that in the 80s he set himself against people you get to sympathise with,” says Fillis. “It’s not unaccommodating to find people on the British gay scene who find him inspirational but in New York they knew him personally – they’re less focused on ‘icon Quentin’ and more on him as a friend.”
For those who were in person obstruct to him, Crisp’s memory remains moving as well as meaningful. The pellicle’s character Phillip Steele is half based on Phillip Ward, who now maintains the Quentin Crisp archives. (The character’s other half, Tom Steele, was one of Crisp’s editors.) Ward, a bearish man with cropped hair, glasses and a silver goatee, saw The Naked Civil Servant on TV in Kentucky before moving to New York in 1979. After he met Crisp in the 80s, they remained close until his death. “He was like my mother, father, brother, sister, lover,” Ward says over margaritas and corn chips at the Cowgirl, a ginghamy gay bar in Manhattan’s West Village. He chokes up as he speaks. “Quentin provided an impetus for us to be ourselves, living without apology. He ran gone from what was bad and became the chat of the town.”
Ward is doing his small piece to keep it that way. One of his duties in the same manner with Crisp’s archivist is “to promote his philosophy of individuality, self-acceptance and tolerance”, which is partly achieved online, via a website, crisperanto.org, and a Facebook page, at what place Crisp has more than 1,500 friends who regularly praise or take issue with the aphorisms Ward posts as status updates. (“If you are toss, pretend not to be shy,” he advises at the time of writing, “and in the cessation you won’t be pitch.” Fillis reports acquirement into arguments on the page over Crisp’s stated views on Oscar Wilde and murder.) Many of these epigrams are drawn from The Dusty Answers, thoughts and arguments recorded on more than 50 audio tapes for the time of the last two years of Crisp’session life which Ward hopes to blaze as his final volume.
Crisp lives on because Penny Arcade, too. Her novel full-length show, Old Queen, recounts her junior experiences with role models and mentors, Crisp being juting among them. In her pink-and-blue-walled Lower East Side apartment, which overflows with vivid paintings and quirky objets d’art, Arcade – short, curvy and pixieish – tells me she and Crisp recognised each other taken in the character of kindred spirits following friends brought him to watch her transact.
“We the couple wanted to be augmented up to be completely ourselves,” she says. Like Ward, she describes Crisp in quasi-parental terms, though they are decidedly estranged siblings, emulating keepers of the flame sceptical of the other’s legitimacy. (Ward, who honours Crisp’s polite habit of referring to vulgar herd as Mr Smith or Ms Jones, won’t even mention Arcade by name.) “My last big fag/fag-hag relationship was with Quentin Crisp,” Arcade says, reading from the script of Old Queen. “Quentin was of a piece a Zen master and I, like his student, had to answer riddles and koans from my own synthesis, from my own point of witness … it was no longer a question of taking in succession the value of others I admired, but sharpening one’s own.”
This privileging of separate musing, she tells me, was what led to tension betwixt Crisp and the gay establishment. “If you didn’t theme about things in the proscribed way, you had internalised homophobia. It was all about status quo and consensus, and status quo and consensus was the last thing Quentin was equipped to participate in.” Arcade blames ageism as well as political difference for many New York gays’ rejection of Crisp but also suggests that his successful self-fashioning curtailed his ability to engage with a radically changing society. “I don’t think he could handle the sort of happened in the world because he would be favored with to care and be angry,” she says, “and care and exasperation were things he had sequestered from his emotional palette a long time before.”
The film’s vision of Crisp behind closed doors rankles with both Ward (“Quentin was not sad and lonely”) and Arcade (“the depiction of Quentin as this poor, lost soul is absurd”). Arcade is also aggrieved at the rejection of her idea of playing herself (“They said only a movie star or TV star could play Penny Arcade. It’s hysterical!”). But both commendation the film’sitting transmission of Crisp’s ideas to a new audience and acknowledge that he was ready for debt of nature.
“I know I have always promised you to live till I am 100 years old,” Arcade reports him saying at 88, “but I was wondering if you would give me a dispensation so I only live to be 90.” Both friends tried to dissuade him from taking the operating dance to England for the time of which he died, on 21 November 1999. “I expressed to him how the cabin pressure would affect his heart and he was very pleased about that,” says Ward. “He wanted to faint, simply because his body was falling apart. It wasn’face to face providing him with the ability to be who he wanted to be. He had two regrets on his death: one was not to be every American citizen; the other was not to have met Elizabeth Taylor.”
Yet Crisp lives on, in his own words, in friends’ memories and in others’ art. In New York’s downtown gay and performance scenes, you don’t have to ask around for long before hearing stories of hilarious lunch dates or minor feuds. Last December, a cabaret party was thrown for the centenary of Crisp’s offspring. And in March, Ward organised a different event, The Naked Bon Vivant!, which featured a raft of new performances inspired by his life and work. Veteran British drag act Lavinia Co-op, avant garde dancer Jack Ferver and others read from his writings while neo-cabarettist Adam Dugas conceived a faux-Cockney music-hall act to deliver a number inspired by a line from The Naked Civil Servant. Emulating Crisp’s influence by looks, guests wore cravats and fedoras – in one case a steeple of them – while a reliquary in the back of the venue was decked out with photographs, scarves, calling cards and other Crispiana. Another tribute playing event is planned for 14 December 2009.
Crisp might have been gratified to know that he is still provoking affection, argument and art, though Fillis suspects he would have been animated. “Were Quentin to be told before he died, ‘Do you realise you’ll distil be being celebrated in 10 years’ time, he’catastrophe say, ‘I don’t care. I’ll be dead. Do what you like.’ Which is wonderful.”
• An Englishman in New York will have being shown on Monday 28 December at 9pm on ITV1
