Writer and filmmaker John Waters insists that he’s not ready to retire, but a museum exhibit in Los Angeles points out that he already did once and it didn’t stick.
The exhibit, “John Waters: Pope of Trash” at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, includes a handwritten flier in which a young John Waters writes about his “temporary retirement” and subsequent decision to return to the work force after a 1½-year absence.
This was in the late 1950s, when Waters was working as a puppeteer at children’s birthday parties and other gatherings, earning up to $25 per show. It was his first job, and his first foray into show business. According to the flier, he had been working as a puppeteer for more than six years when he took a break.
“ATTENTION PARENTS!!!” the flier states. “As of the first of April, John Waters will return by demand to giving inexpensive Top Rate puppet shows for children’s parties, church groups etc., after a 1 ½ year temporary retirement due to school obligations. A standard in this field for over six years, an all-new improved show will be offered for the same EARTH SHATTERINGLY low prices that have kept Mr. Waters in constant demand for years!!!”
The flier doesn’t have a specific date on it, but a museum representative said the year was 1959 – 65 years ago. Waters would have been 12 or 13, meaning he launched his puppet business at 5 or 6.
Now another April has come around and with it another birthday for Waters, who turns 78 today.
The flier is a significant document not so much because of the coming-out-of-retirement angle but because it’s a tangible reminder of Waters’ roots as a storyteller, performer and entertainer.
Puppeteering entails creating characters and storylines; choosing costumes; building sets; marketing and running a business; interacting with the audience and updating productions so people come back more than once. It’s show business in microcosm and in Waters’ case, both a template and precursor for the way he’s spent much of his life. That makes his flier a remarkably telling and prescient artifact, and a great find for museum curators Jenny He and Dara Jaffe. If Waters hadn’t started as a puppeteer, he may never have gone on to the multi-faceted career the museum is celebrating today.
Early taste of show business
The exhibit has no photos of Waters as a puppeteer, but the filmmaker has spoken frequently in interviews and during his stand-up performances about his puppet shows and what he learned presenting them.
In a book that accompanies the exhibit, also called “John Waters Pope of Trash,” critic, curator and author B. Ruby Rich related how Waters’ puppet shows, and a trip he took with his parents to see one famous puppet, gave him an early taste of show business.
“As a boy, John Waters was treated to a formative outing by his parents,” Rich wrote in an essay entitled “From Underground Movies to the New Queer Cinema.” “They took him on a trip to the NBC studios in New York City, for a broadcast of ‘Howdy Doody’ (1947-60). Entering the set and witnessing multiple ‘Howdy Doody’ puppets strewn about, the youngster had a momentous realization: ‘It’s all fake!” He recalls that this was the moment he decided he ‘had to go into show business.’ And so he did, performing puppet shows for children’s birthday parties, chauffeured by his father and earning his own money.”
Rich noted in her essay that puppet shows were an “oddly popular presence” in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. In addition to ‘Howdy Doody,’ puppets were featured on early television shows such as ‘Kukla, Fran and Ollie,’ ‘Captain Kangaroo,’ ‘The Shari Lewis Show’ with Lamb Chop and even ‘The Ed Sullivan Show’ with Topo Gigio.
“When television was launched, the nonhuman actors were quickly drafted,” she wrote. “Puppets filled a niche as the new medium sought to get up to speed with programming to capture audience attention. They helped to fill the otherwise empty hours on the station schedules.”
Foreshadowing a career in entertainment
Here are six ways that Waters’ years as a puppeteer foreshadowed his later work as a writer, raconteur, filmmaker and businessman. It marked:
His start as a storyteller, director and performer: Waters dreamed up the shows; assembled his cast; traveled from venue to venue; breathed life into the puppets and gave them different voices, all in front of an audience that he brought together. “Back then Waters bought the puppets at stores (he was never one for crafts) and presented their dramas on a small ‘three-screen’ stage with red velvet curtains,” Rich wrote.
His start in business: He was a self-starter who marketed his shows, negotiated with clients, tailored his product to each customer; arrived and left on schedule, and decided how to spend what he earned. He didn’t waste time pitching his shows to children, who made up his audience but didn’t have money to pay him. Instead, he got the names of his parents’ friends and solicited them directly.
His strong work ethic: The passion and energy that Waters put into marketing and performing his puppet shows was a harbinger of the work ethic that he’s maintained throughout his life. He didn’t need to put on puppet shows to support his family. He did it out of a drive to tell his stories and earn some spending money in the process. He still gets up early and starts writing at 8 a.m. sharp, then uses the afternoon to sell what he dreams up in the morning.
As a puppeteer, “he worked hard, two shows a week, and that work ethic stuck,” Rich wrote. “He does much the same today (minus the puppets and daddy) and at a far greater pace, with holiday shows, book signings, talk-show guest slots, and in-person events like the Moosewood Meltdown festival in Oakland and Camp John Waters in Connecticut (which capitalizes on his reputation for ‘camp’), all wildly popular.”
His appreciation for Shock Value: Waters didn’t just regurgitate familiar fairy tales such as Cinderella. He knew the impact Shock Value can have. He put a twist on predictable stories, often incorporating surprise endings that would shock or scare his audience. In his telling, one of ugly stepsisters might get Prince Charming, not Cinderella. He had one puppet in particular, a dragon, that he’d use to torment the kids in his audience.
“By the end of each show, he’d storm out from behind those curtains, breaking the fourth wall to reveal himself to the children, working the crowd, biting kids with the dragon puppet on his hand,” Rich said. “That audience reacted much as his audiences would continue to react throughout his career: ‘with horror and glee,’ as he recalls.”
His start as a champion of misfits and underdogs: The puppet shows allowed Waters to channel his imagination in ways that showed off his knack for improvisation, subversion and, especially, use of humor to make a point. His shows served as a gateway of sorts to themes he later explored in his books and films, especially his inclination to understand and champion misfits and outcasts in society – the quirky, the downtrodden, the ‘other.’
“The puppet shows were powerful cultural artifacts that could well have offered alternative fantasy worlds, free of traditional gender and narrative norms, spaces where laughter was permitted, encouraged and never inappropriate,” Rich wrote. “Uncoupled from realist conventions, puppet shows could allow a freeing of the imagination, even opening a space of rebellion and experimentation for a generation of kids raised on them. And if those puppets were not queer exactly, they could hardly be accused of heteronormativity either.”
His reluctance to retire: Waters didn’t elaborate in his flier about the cause of his temporary retirement other than to say: “due to school obligations.” Whatever the reason for his temporary hiatus, he was clearly glad to be back, with a new and improved show to boot.
After coming out of retirement in 1959, he hasn’t stopped working. From puppeteering, he graduated to making movies while he was still a teenager, with the eight-millimeter camera his grandmother gave him for his 16th birthday. He started Dreamland studio in the bedroom of his childhood home on Morris Avenue in Lutherville, Maryland. He promoted his early films with handwritten fliers that were reminiscent of the ones he used to promote his puppet shows.
‘I was a carny then’
Asked this week about the flier and his “temporary retirement,” Waters said “school obligations” wasn’t really the reason he cut back on his puppet shows.
“I was a carny then,” he said. “I think I just stopped it for a while because I thought it wasn’t cool and then decided I needed it. I wanted to go back for the money and a new kind of show, to get back into show business.”
And the part about school obligations?
“That’s just bullshit I just made up. I was just being a 12-year-old carny,” he said. “Retirement? That’s carny bullshit. School obligations? I never paid attention to school obligations in my whole life. That was just bullshit. That was just because I hadn’t done it for a while. I don’t know what I was thinking at 12. I just had to sell a puppet show.”
He made $25 per show?
“I did make $25, but that was probably at the height of my career,” he said this week. “I don’t remember what I started at.” He said earlier this year that he did as many as three shows a week.
How did he spend the money he made with his puppet shows?
“Rock and roll 45 records. That was my obsession then,” he said this week. “And those same records, I ended up using them in the soundtracks of my movies. That’s what I spent the spoils of puppetry on.”
Waters said there are definite parallels between his puppet shows and the stand-up appearances he makes today.
“When I come out and do my show, it’s the same as coming behind the puppet show stage with the dragon puppet and biting kids’ hands,” he said. “I’m still doing that.”
He said puppeteering has been particularly valuable as a precedent for the voiceover work he does today for cartoons and other animated productions, because it gave him experience developing dozens of different voices.
“I do voiceover work a lot,” he said. “I do it all the time and that is because I was a puppeteer…. It made me able to do voiceover work for cartoons and stuff because I had to do all the voices of the puppets. I had 50 voices for the puppets when I was a kid.”
Puppets in the future?
Waters said this week that he has no plans to retire. On Saturday he performed his spoken-word show, “Devil’s Advocate,” in Providence, Rhode Island. For his 78th birthday tonight, he’ll perform his show before a sold-out crowd at City Winery in Manhattan. Then he’s heading to Canada for three shows.
The birthday show is a Waters tradition – performing every year on his birthday and on holidays such as Valentine’s Day and Easter. “The only thing I don’t have is a Groundhog Day show,” he said.
Waters’ days as a puppeteer may not be over. At his Valentine’s Day show in Baltimore this year, he mused about making a return to puppeteering, only this time it would be puppets acting out “hideous fairy tales” for “really rich kids in Beverly Hills” willing to pay $30,000 apiece, cash only. The suggestion was that it might be a fitting way to come full cycle in his career, by going back to his childhood vocation.
Speaking by phone from New York this week, Waters said he was joking about going back to puppetry, but one never knows.
“I don’t know that I’m going to have to do that, but you always have to have backup plans,” he said. “I could do it again, definitely. You can never have too many backup plans. That is my final one – to go back to puppetry. Maybe that will be the final end of my career.”
