Hookers Welcome Elephants

Dracula Sucks, the Lost Manhattan World of Henry Orient, Oh Susannah!

By DAVID NOH

The Hookers’ Ball at Crobar on August 26 proved the perfect event to counteract the Republican Convention’s unwonted and, most definitely unwanted, incursion into our city. Hooker delegations proudly represented all 50 states, while a bodacious, blindfolded Bob led the Star Spangled Banner. A gaggle of splendiferously accoutered freaks and those who love them assembled for a costume contest, with contestants serving their best Mack Daddy Pimp and Patriotic Showgirl Hooker Glamour looks.

Nightlife legends Chi Chi Valenti and Johnny Dynell conceived this ball in 1999 to lament the demise of streetwalking in the now terminally chic Meatpacking District. Their parties have always had the most fabulous vibe: purely inclusive, regardless of age, color or gender—they’re the nearest we have to the fabled 70s party days.

I’ve known Chi Chi since we were both babies at Studio 54, dressed in a black Joan Crawford picture hat, lace top and leather pants—that was me. She was in full dominatrix gear, replete with Nazi Slutgirl pulp paperback under her arm—our eyes met across the club at Karl Lagerfeld’s Bauhaus party, and every freak alarm in the world went off. Her parties are still the kind of affairs where any boy can get in touch with his inner diva, throw, say, a Galliano top (or reasonable facsimile) on, enter, and be immediately, sensually mauled by some bi-curious studmuffin in the best old 54-Mudd Club tradition.

Yes, “Dracula” is indeed as bad as everyone says. It’s too bad there have to be critics, because, without them, this show might have been a hit with those less discerning hordes of tourists, having that huge cheese factor many of them confuse with culture. But Frank Wildhorn’s music is so abysmal you actually yearn for Lloyd Webber, with lyrics like “I wish I had wings/No that isn’t true/If I had wings/How could I not fly straight to you?” Christopher Hampton is probably the most employed writer in show business, and his exhausted, idea-free book proves this all too clearly.

From the minute someone brings out a baby as vampire food, you know the show is doomed. Killing babies, in any context, just ain’t the sort of stuff to make Broadway sing. Tom Hewitt brings nothing fresh to the role of Dracula, save endlessly flying across the stage (the show is very Cirque du Soleil) and his “ancient” castle is Art Nouveau in design, which, given the 1897 period, suggests that he’s very recently remodeled. At one point, just-bitten Melissa Erricoe begs for someone to kill her (and you think, “So you’ll never be in another flop.”).

On the night I saw it, actor Bart Shatto, I think, ad-libbed a line, which caused his co-actors to stifle amusement. If the cast has any sense, they will stop trying to take this crap seriously and just have a ball sending it up.

“The World of Henry Orient” (1964) is a special film. Not only is it a charming children’s fable about the friendship of two lonely girls, obsessed by a famous conductor (Peter Sellers), but it’s a marvelous time capsule of a more genteel, now-dead Manhattan, before the inundation of Starbucks, clueless tourists and raucous packs of teenagers, dressed and sounding like hookers.

To celebrate the film’s screenwriters, Nunnally and Nora Johnson, the Lincoln Center Film Society on August 25 presented a screening of “Henry Orient” in glorious Cinemascope. In attendance were Holly Hunter (looking great and standing in the ticket line like everybody else), Nora Johnson (who wrote the book the film was adapted from, as well as the screenplay, in partnership with her dad) and Merrie Spaeth, who played Johnson’s alter ego, in the movie.

“This was absolutely my story,” Johnson told me. “I was a student at Brearley and I had a friend who was obsessed with Oscar Levant, so we’d spend our days stalking him.”

Spaeth, now 56, looks remarkably unchanged, and is as refreshingly natural as she was onscreen 40 years ago (in marked contrast to her mannered, manic co-star Tippi Walker). “I have my own consulting firm in Dallas now,” she said. “It’s not that I hated acting, it’s just that life takes you in different directions.” She pointed to her time as a 14-year-old, filming in Manhattan with a hotel room, salary and $300-per-week stipend as the financial highpoint of her entire life.

For anyone who missed Susannah York’s “Shakespeare’s Women,” I can assure you that she remains one dynamo of an actress, with a huskily powerful voice that rang the rafters. She gave fully detailed performances of the Bard’s most famous monologues for everyone from Lady Macbeth to “The Merry Wives of Windsor” which were, in a word, thrilling, an intriguing distaff complement to John Gielgud’s famous “Ages of Man.” She looked marvelous, too. I confess to being a tad apprehensive, seeing how so many of her contemporaries, like Julie Christie, Mary Tyler Moore, Dyan Cannon and Faye Dunaway, have ruined their looks with facial “work,” but, while York may have had a few things tucked, she’s happily left her trademark wide mouth alone, definitely taking her out of the running for the role of The Joker, should “Batman” be made again.

Contact David Noh at Inthenoh@aol.com.