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Quentin Crisp

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Quentin Crisp.

For the writer of supernatural fiction, see Quentin S. Crisp

Quentin Crisp (December 25, 1908 – November 21, 1999), was an English writer, artist's model, actor and raconteur known for his memorable and insightful witticisms. He became a gay icon in the 1970s after publication of his memoir The Naked Civil Servant brought to the attention of the general public his defiant exhibitionism and longstanding refusal to conceal his homosexuality.

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[edit] Early life

Born Denis Charles Pratt in Sutton, Surrey, the fourth child of accountant, Charles Pratt (1871 – 1931) and former governess Frances Pratt (née Phillips)(1873 – 1960), he changed his name to Quentin Crisp in his twenties after leaving home and cultivating his outlandishly effeminate appearance to a standard that both shocked contemporary Londoners and provoked homophobic attacks.

By his own account, Crisp was effeminate in behaviour from an early age and found himself the object of teasing at Kingswood Preparatory School in Epsom, from where he won a scholarship to Denstone College, near Uttoxeter in 1922. Whilst in the sixth form, Crisp served in and eventually commanded a squad in the Officer's Cadet Force. After leaving school in 1926, Crisp studied journalism at King's College London but failed to graduate in 1928, going on to take art classes at Regent Street Polytechnic.

Around this time, Crisp began frequenting the cafés of Soho – his favourite being The Black Cat in Old Compton Street – meeting other young gay men and rent-boys, and experimenting with make-up and women's clothes. For six months he worked as a prostitute, looking for love, he said in a 1999 interview, but only finding degradation.

Crisp left home to move to the centre of London at the end of 1930 and, after living in a succession of flats, found a bed-sitting room in Denbeigh Street, where he held court with London's brightest and roughest characters. His outlandish appearance – he wore bright make-up, dyed his long hair crimson, painted his fingernails and wore sandals to display his painted toenails – brought admiration and curiosity from some quarters but generally attracted hostility and violence from strangers passing him in the streets.

Quentin Crisp 1941.

[edit] Middle years

Crisp attempted to join the army at the outbreak of the Second World War, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that he was 'suffering from sexual perversion'. He remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased five pounds of Henna and paraded through the blackout, picking up GIs, whose kindness and open-mindedness inspired his love of all things American.

In 1940 he moved into the bed-sitting room he would occupy for the next forty years, the first floor apartment at 129 Beaufort Street, London. Here he stayed until he emigrated to the United States in 1981. In the intervening years he never attempted any housework, saying famously in his memoir that the dirt didn't get any worse after the first four years.

He left his job as engineer's tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties, and continued posing for artists for the next three decades. 'It was like being a civil servant,' he explained in his autobiography, 'except that you were naked.'

Crisp had published three short books by the time he was commissioned by the director of Jonathan Cape to complete what would become The Naked Civil Servant. Having heard Crisp interviewed on radio in 1964 he was keen to produce something of his in print. The book appeared in 1968 to respectable reviews. When the book was reprinted in 1975 on the strength of the success of the television version of The Naked Civil Servant, Gay News commented that the book should have been published posthumously. Quentin said this was a polite way of their telling him to drop dead.

Subsequently, Crisp was approached by documentary maker Denis Mitchell to be the subject of a short film in which he was expected to talk about his life, voice his opinions and sit around in his Beaufort Street apartment filing his nails. The broadcast brought enough attention to Crisp and his book that he soon entered talks about a dramatisation of his book starring John Hurt as Quentin Crisp.

[edit] Fame

The successful screening of The Naked Civil Servant launched Crisp in another new direction: that of performer and lecturer. He devised a one-man show and began touring the country with it. The first half of the show was an entertaining monologue loosely based on his memoirs, the second half was a question and answer session with Crisp picking the audience's written questions out at random and answering them in an amusing manner. In 1978 Crisp sold out the Duke of York's Theatre in London, then took the show to New York, where he eventually decided to move. His first stay there, in the Hotel Chelsea, coincided with a fire, a robbery, and the death of Nancy Spungen. He set about making arrangements to move to New York permanently and in 1981 he arrived with few possessions and found a small apartment in Manhattan's Lower East Side.

He continued to perform his one-man show, published books on etiquette and supported himself by accepting social invitations and writing movie reviews and columns for U.S. and UK magazines and newspapers. He said that provided one could exist on peanuts and champagne, one could quite easily live by going to every cocktail party, premiere and first night to which one was invited. As he had done in London, Crisp allowed his phone number to be listed in the Manhattan telephone directory and saw it as his duty to converse with anyone who called him. For the first twenty or so years of owning his own telephone he habitually answered calls with the phrase "Yes, God?" ("Just in case," he once said.) Later on he changed it to "Oh yes?" in a querulous tone of voice.

In addition to his listed phone number, Mr. Crisp would accept dinner invitations from almost anyone. While it was expected that the inviter would pay for dinner, Mr. Crisp did his best to "sing for his supper" by regaling his hosts with wonderful stories and yarns much as he did in his theatre performances. Dinner with Quentin Crisp was said to be one of the best shows in New York.

During the 1980s and 1990s Crisp gained worldwide recognition when Sting dedicated his song "Englishman In New York" to him. Sting wrote the song not long after Crisp moved from London to an apartment in New York's Bowery. Crisp had remarked jokingly to the musician "...that he looked forward to receiving his naturalization papers so that he could commit a crime and not be deported." In late 1986 Sting visited Crisp in his apartment in New York and was told over dinner — and the next three days — what life had been like for a homosexual man in the homophobic Great Britain of the 1920s to the 1960s. Sting was shocked and fascinated at the same time and decided to write the song. In his 1995 autobiography "Take It Like A Man" Boy George tells about how he had always felt very close to Crisp during his childhood since he was facing similar problems as a young homosexual living in a homophobic surrounding.

[edit] Last years

Crisp remained fiercely independent and unpredictable into old age. He caused controversy and confusion in the gay community by calling AIDS 'a fad', and homosexuality 'a terrible disease', and famously commented disrespectfully on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. However he was continually in demand from journalists requiring a sound-bite, and throughout the nineties his commentary was sought on any number of topics.

The year after The Naked Civil Servant was broadcast on British and American television and made both actor John Hurt and Crisp himself into stars, the former nude model & prostitute, now theatre-filling rancoteur, himself made his debut as a film actor in the Royal College of Art's low-budget production of Hamlet (1976). Crisp played Polonius in the 65-minute adaptation of one of Shakespeare's greatest works, in support of Helen Mirren, who doubled as Ophelia and Gertrude. It would be nine years before his next turn before the cameras, in the 1985 film The Bride, which brought him into contact with Sting, who played the lead role of Baron Frankenstein. Sting later wrote a song about Crisp, "Englishman in New York", that includes the lines:

It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile, Be yourself no matter what they say.

He appeared on the television show "The Equalizer" in the 1987 episode "First Light" and as the narrator of director Richard Kwietniowski's short film Ballad of Reading Gaol (1988), based on the immortal poem by Crisp's seminal forefather, Oscar Wilde. Four years later he was cast in a lead role, and got top billing, in the low-buget independent film Topsy and Bunker: The Cat Killers, which was filmed in New York City, his new home town for over a decade. According to "Topsy and Bunker" director Thomas Massengale, Crisp was delightful to work with, and the 1990s would prove to be his most prolific decade as an actor as more and more directors offered him roles.

In 1992, he was persuaded by Sally Potter to play Elizabeth I in the film Orlando. Although he found the role taxing, he won acclaim for a dignified and touching performance. Crisp next had an uncredited cameo in the controversial 1993 AIDS drama Philadelphia.

In 1996 he was among the many people interviewed for the historical documentary on how Hollywood films have depicted homosexuality, entitled The Celluloid Closet. In his final volume of memoirs, Resident Alien, published in the same year, Crisp stated that he was close to the end of his life. However, a humorous pact he had made with Penny Arcade to live to one hundred, with ten years off for good behaviour proved prophetic.

In June 1996 he was one of the guest entertainers at the second Pride Scotland festival in Glasgow.

Crisp died shortly before his ninety-first birthday in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Greater Manchester, on the eve of a nationwide revival of his one-man show. His body was cremated with a minimum of ceremony, and his ashes flown back to New York and scattered over Manhattan.

[edit] Works by Quentin Crisp

  • Lettering for Brush and Pen, (1936), Quentin Crisp and A.F. Stuart, Frederick Warne Ltd. Manual on advertising fonts.
  • Colour in Display, (1938) Quentin Crisp, 131 pages, The Blandford Press. Manual on the use of colour in window displays.
  • All This And Bevin Too (1943) Quentin Crisp, illustrated by Mervyn Peake, Mervyn Peake Society ISBN 0-9506125-0-2. Parable, in verse, about an unemployed kangaroo.
  • The Naked Civil Servant, (1968) Quentin Crisp, 222 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-654044-9. Quentin Crisp's witty and wise account of the first half of his life.
  • Love Made Easy, (1977) Quentin Crisp, 154 pages, Duckworth, ISBN 0-7156-1188-7. Fantastical, semi-autobiographical novel.
  • How to Have a Life Style, (1975), Quentin Crisp, 159 pages, Cecil Woolf Publishing, ISBN 0-900821-83-3. Elegant and insightful essays on charisma and personality.
  • Chog: A Gothic Fantasy, (1979), Quentin Crisp, illustrated by Jo Lynch, 165 pages, Methuen, ISBN 0-413-39490-5. Dark novel about the household of a ruinous stately home.
  • How to Become a Virgin, (1981) Quentin Crisp, 192 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-638798-5. Second installment of autobiography, describing the fame his first book and its dramatisation brought.
  • Doing It With Style, (1981) Quentin Crisp, with Donald Carroll, illustrated by Jonathan Hills, 157 pages, Methuen, ISBN 0-413-47490-9. A guide to thoughtful and stylish living.
  • The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp, (1984) Quentin Crisp, edited by Guy Kettelhack, Harper & Row, 140 pages, ISBN 0-06-091178-6. Compilation of Crisp's essays and quotations.
  • Manners from Heaven: a divine guide to good behaviour, (1984) Quentin Crisp, with John Hofsess, Hutchinson, ISBN 0-09-155810-7. Insightful instructions for compassionate living.
  • How to Go to the Movies (1988) Quentin Crisp, 224 pages, St. Martin's Press, ISBN 0-312-05444-0. Movie reviews and essays on film.
  • The Gay and Lesbian Quotation Book: a literary companion, (1989) edited by Quentin Crisp, Hale, 185 pages ISBN 0-7090-5605-2. Anthology of gay-related quotes.
  • Resident Alien: The New York Diaries (1996) Quentin Crisp, 225 pages, HarperCollins, ISBN 0-00-638717-9. Diaries and recollections from 1990-94.

[edit] Biographies of Quentin Crisp

  • The Stately Homo: a celebration of the life of Quentin Crisp, (2000) edited by Paul Bailey, Bantam, 251 pages, ISBN 0-593-04677-3. Collection of interviews and tributes from those who knew Crisp.
  • Quentin Crisp, (2002), Tim Fountain, Absolute Press, 192 pages, ISBN 1-899791-48-5. Biography by dramatist who knew Crisp in the last few years of his life.
  • Quentin and Philip, (2002), Andrew Barrow, Macmillan, 559 pages, ISBN 0-333-78051-5. Dual biography of Crisp and his friend Philip O'Connor.

[edit] References

  • Take It Like A Man, Boy George, Sidgwick & Jackson, 490 pages, ISBN 0-283-99217-4. Autobiography of Boy George.
  • In the song "The Ballad of Jack Eric Williams (and Other Three-Named Composers)" from William Finn's song-cycle Elegies.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] External links

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