The eclectic director has many muses — from Johnny Mathis to Leslie Van Houten — but Baltimore may be his biggest
By Michael Sragow, The Baltimore Sun
You might think you know John Waters, but until you read his latest book, "Role Models" — well, to quote Jeremy Irons' Claus von Bulow, "You have no idea".
Waters avidly links his "Baltimore heroes," like the lesbian stripper Lady Zorro ("My kind of burlesque queen"), to far-flung friends and influences. They include "genius fashion dictator" Rei Kawakubo, who once brought him to Paris to model her work, and "outsider pornographers" like David Hurles. They also include artists and entertainers as popular as Johnny Mathis and as widely acclaimed as the psychological novelist Lionel Shriver ("We Need to Talk About Kevin"). Their one common denominator is the encouragement or caution they or their work gave him as he developed and sustained a unique lifestyle and an improbable and enduring career.
Sitting in his North Baltimore house a couple of weeks before publication, Waters says "Role Models" started when the New Directions publishing house invited him to introduce the memoirs of Tennessee Williams, the most poetic of all American playwrights. Asking the auteur of "Pink Flamingos" and "Hairspray" to celebrate the author of "The Glass Menagerie" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" proved to be an inspired idea. Link
