OK, so it was an accident. In a revealing new interview with New York magazine, the 61-year-old director of Pink Flamingos and Hairspray makes it clear he’s not ready for a life of early bird specials and Matlock reruns. He’s ready to start shooting his 17th film Fruitcake, and Cry-Baby is about to follow Hairspray to the Broadway stage. He’s working on a book called Role Models, “a self-portrait where I write profiles of other people and how much I love them and how much they changed my life and influenced me—famous people, criminals, people you’ve never heard of.” But as Ariel Levy writes, “his interests have remained intact: art, sex, drugs, class, and transgression.”
Levy gets a tour of Waters’ home in Baltimore: “One of the first things you see upon entering is the electric chair Divine died in in Female Trouble…A framed pair of Patty Hearst’s glasses (‘She was wearing those when she got arrested!’) hangs on the wall in the bathroom downstairs, next to some photographs of couch cushions that somehow look a lot like a vagina. On top of the toilet there’s a bowl of fake brownies and cookies. In fact, there is fake food in every room. Fake sushi in the dining room, a leg of lamb in Waters’s office, rubber blueberry pie in his bedroom. In the guest room that doesn’t lead to the bomber’s room, there is a bookshelf on which Waters has organized the books by category, one subject per shelf: extreme weather, psychological disorders, Nazis, Catholicism, high society.”
Then there are some of the director’s favorite haunts, like a feminist sex store owned by one of his assistant directors. (Waters: “Well, let me see the vibrating cock rings.” Sales clerk: “I think we’re out.”) And that crack-smoking incident? “He was having a party at his house in Baltimore and someone passed him a pipe that he assumed was packed with pot, so he took a puff. ‘I thought, Am I addicted? Am I gonna rob my parents now? I had a horrible hangover, but I’d been drinking anyway. I was glad, actually, in a way. I would never now purposely try a new drug, I don’t think, but I’m secretly glad I know what it feels like.’”
All that and much more here.