Ron Vawter in “Roy Cohn/Jack Smith”
Long beaded necklaces, faux pearls, brooches, golden baubles, jingle-jangling bracelets, and an assortment of other ornate, tacky costume jewelry tossed in a clicking-clacking heap inside of an unused toilet. That is the sublime image—the pinnacle of the trash aesthetic—that I’ve been unable to get out of my head since attending a screening of Jill Godmilow’s criminally hard-to-find Roy Cohn/Jack Smith at Anthology Film Archives (so hard to find it’s even difficult to find much about it online). The closeup of this unexpected jewelry box–or really, can–unsurprisingly comes from the latter half of the film’s moniker as actor Ron Vawter channels the wayward, vamping, muttering performances of underground cinema legend and fellow flaming creature Jack Smith, as he reclines like an Odalisque, his face drenched in silver, blue, and red glitter. Frequently stopping mid-sentence, Vawter as Smith speed-freakishly and obsessively futzes, adjusts, and improves his opulent veiled Scheherazade of the Lower East Side costume by pawing through these toilet bowl trinkets. Oh, a curved charm like a crescent moon or a sword! Would this look best on top of the veil? Or how about on the arm? That’s it! Oh, is there a theatrical production going on?
On two levels, yes. Godmilow’s 1994 film is a cinematic interpretation of an original theater piece of the same name in which Vawter, a white gay man living with AIDS, embodies two iconic and enormously complicated white gay men who died from AIDS-related causes. The original production divided these two figures into separate acts. The first is devoted to greasy sleazeball disco and mafia lawyer, McCarthy stooge, and Donnie T’s preeminent filth elder Roy Cohn who delivers an impassioned and imagined speech to the American Association for the Protection of the Family in 1976. Since Vawter couldn’t find the text of Cohn’s actual speech, writer Gary Indiana penned it instead. The second Jack Smith-dedicated act, conversely, employs found material: a recreation of Smith’s 1981 What’s Underground About Marshmallows?, derived from a singular remaining audio recording saved by performer Penny Arcade.
Smith’s death in 1989 was the spark that drove the creation of Roy Cohn/Jack Smith. Vawter, a founding member of the Wooster Group, not to mention an actor in more mainstream films like The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, and, less known but worth a mention so you can see Nick Cave’s bit part with a shock of Jim Jarmusch white hair, Johnny Suede, admired Smith’s unrelenting take on theater. This includes Smith’s punishing, sometimes hours-long productions within his roach-filled apartment, decorated like a, as Nick Zedd describes in Totem of the Depraved, “kindergarten version of Baghdad.”
And though I admire that unforgiving approach, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith is not that kind of sadistic theater—or cinema, for that matter. Godmilow’s film, which was shown in a beautifully restored, lushly colored 16mm at Anthology as a part of an unfortunately short screening series on the production, organized with Electronic Arts Intermix, throws out the two-act conceit. Instead, Godmilow mixes footage of Vawter as Cohn and as Smith, alongside some black-and-white behind-the-scenes footage of Vawter perfecting Cohn’s nasally whine and color imagery of Vawter dabbing blue glitter over his eyebrows. Godmilow’s camera also lingers on the audience—sometimes well-known personalities like Penny Arcade and poet John Giorno, whose recognizable face opens the film, and other times, more anonymous (to me) people leaning forward, mouths agape. These choices have a few added effects, not the least of which is rendering Roy Cohn/Jack Smith much more visually interesting than a straightforward record of the play (which does exist but I skipped that screening). More importantly, Godmilow’s cinematic choices encourage an even more stark juxtaposition between Cohn and Smith themselves, as well as capture, through close-ups and unusually captivating angles that reveal the distinguishing lesions of Kaposi’s sarcoma, the incredible vulnerability in Vawter’s performance when he is visibly sick himself (and would die four months later).
Despite their mirror identities and eventual illness, Vawter’s takes on Cohn and Smith could not be more different. Cohn, sipping champagne in a smoking jacket, is all high-frequency, high-pitched, hyperactive edge. He’s snappy, fast-talking, quick-witted, loud-mouthed, and closeted shifty-eyed. Much of Cohn’s wit here, of course, is courtesy of Indiana’s monologue, which is uproariously funny with a heavy dose of irony as Cohn fixates on all that gay depravity while arguing against a gay rights bill. He regales the conservative audience with tales of West Side bars such as The Toilet (a parallel with Smith’s jewelry john) where homosexuals perform filthy acts like fisting (“And sometimes the entire arm!”), moans about his existence as a lifelong bachelor (“I’m told the matchmakers have given up, but I haven’t!”), and trails off into memories of his childhood (“I WAS A SHY KID!”) and the McCarthy era (“I never felt the slightest qualm about the execution of the Rosenbergs, frankly”). At times, Cohn loses himself completely, blurting out piercing non-sequiturs like “KNOW WHAT I LIKE MORE THAN ANYTHING? BIRTHDAY CAKE!” Something is not quite right with Roy. Not only does Cohn come off as a clownish personality, but there is also something tragic here: a flop-sweat nervousness, noticeable in his long anxious water break. It’s a palpable fear that somebody—anybody!—in this right-wing viper nest might notice he’s a little light in his loafers too.
In contrast, Vawter’s Jack Smith is slow, meandering, dreamy. The first voice we hear in the Smith segments is Smith’s own, muffled out through headphones that Vawter wore in order to listen to Smith’s recordings as a method of nailing his strange deep chesty monotone voice. Admittedly, the plot of What’s Underground About Marshmallows? is, like much of Smith’s theater, hard to follow. This is partially due to Vawter’s mumbling, halting delivery and partially due to Smith’s invented vocabulary of lobsters, landlords, and various nicknames for Jonas Mekas, against whom he continually railed. Mostly, though, Smith enigmatically arranges and rearranges his surroundings, flipping through wrinkled gels to slip into his standing lamp, sifting through the aforementioned luxury loo, and hollering at his mostly silent assistant (played by Coco McPherson) to dutifully change the slides projected behind him, play a cassette, or recite the titles all of Maria Montez’s films.
It would be all too easy to interpret this contrast between Cohn and Smith as bad vs. good and leave it at that. Most would probably prefer it. Certainly, Cohn is a perfect gay villain. Nevermind that enough people have written about how Smith could be a controlling nutjob, including Gary Indiana, to not place him firmly in the role of angel to Cohn’s devil. Roy Cohn/Jack Smith is more complicated than this binary moralism anyway. I found myself more curious about Cohn and Smith’s similarities than their differences, namely how both men reacted to a homophobic society by essentially creating their own realities, world-making, if you will. For Smith, it’s more obvious. His response to living on a rented island as a struggling artist in a society of landlords was to spackle Arabian arches into his apartment doorways and star in his own endless Maria Montez movie. Cohn, too, constructed his own reality: a zero-sum game of paranoid power players, shady backroom deals, commie scare tactics, and white-knuckle social and political control, all to avoid that shy kid who hated camp (summer camp, that is) and loved his “sainted” Mama.
The screening I attended at Anthology was a typical East Village comedy of errors: a late start, a sudden lack of sound, a broken projector, an extended pause between reel-switching, and a director who didn’t seem to recall anything about the making of the film. Yet, the most absurd moment came from a boomer audience member who raised her hand to ask who among the crowd attended the original theatrical run in the early 1990s. Only a few people raised their hands. “Then, what are the rest of you doing here?” I tried to muffle my snickers and urge to answer that I came for Roy Cohn (which, to be fair, was part of the draw). Barring the delusion of a person I assume also rants about the lack of appreciation of the New York counter-cultural scene of the late 20th century (that old chestnut), it’s a ridiculous question in the context of the film. While Smith’s Lower Manhattan Baghdad has been lost to continual shifts of gentrification, partially driven by all that freed-up real estate in the wake of HIV/AIDS, Cohn’s constructed world remains our own. Still, even thirty years after Godmilow’s film and thirty years after Vawter’s death. Until that isn’t the case and artists like Smith don’t have to cook up a cracked camp utopia to momentarily replace it, Roy Cohn/Jack Smith will always be relevant.