Happy Birthday To Me

Remember when having a birthday was fun? When your parents selected a theme for your party and all your rotten little friends wore hats and had noisemakers and cheered as you blew out the candles on your cake? Well, now if you’re at your own birthday party you look around at all the worried faces of your friends and imagine they are probably thinking, “Christ, I hope they don’t ask me to speak at his memorial…”

When I managed a movie theater on Cape Cod in the 70s, I would send out invitations, rent films and take over the theater for my “special day.” It was a blast, forever erasing the foul stench of birthdays. It was a way of controlling the situation, not to mention forcing friends to watch weird films I loved. When I think back on this it’s amazing my boss actually let me get away with it. I had rule over the theater for the whole afternoon, a projectionist at my disposal, and my guests could drink, smoke, eat cake, have sex- hell, I didn’t care.

The very first year I did the party I didn’t send out invitations and only had one film- the late, great Sam Fuller’s The Naked Kiss, and it worked like gang-busters. Made in 1964, the film opens with a bald prostitute (Constance Towers) beating her pimp over the head. She moves to a small-town where she gets a job in the orthopedic ward of a hospital and falls in love with the town benefactor. He turns out to be a child molester, so she beats him to death with a telephone. It’s just astonishing. I remember turning around in the theater to see my friends open-mouthed in shock and delight.

The next year I decided on a double bill. I picked Russ Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, and Robert Aldrich’s The Legend Of Lylah Clare. One could not go wrong with Pussycat!, with just the right mix of large-breasted babes, mock violence and nasty dialogue. The amazing Tura Satana stars as the leather-clad lesbian leader of a girl gang who holes up in the desert with her stripper friends (Haji & Lori Williams) to find an old hermit’s hidden cache of money. Full of frugging, kung fu and dazzling double-entendres, it never ceases to amaze. The Legend Of Lylah Clare stars Kim Novak as (possibly) the reincarnation of a famous movie queen who died under mysterious circumstances. She auditions for a bio-pic about Lylah and comes into contact a director (Peter Finch) who actually was married to the late movie queen and other people who played a part in the real tragedy. It’s such a bizarre film. It’s kind of a mess, but an utterly fascinating mess. There’s a scene with Novak and Peter Finch walking through the garden where she is, inexplicably, just in her bra. The scene brought down the house at my party. Everyone stomped and clapped also at the bitterly sardonic ending which involves a dog food commercial on TV.

My invitation was a gruesome still from a 1966 version of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Black Cat, depicting a woman with an axe through her head. It was the perfect way to weed out guests. Those who thought it was funny would come and enjoy any damn thing I showed. It was a wonderful party and the audience really got into Lylah Clare which relieved me. And as my invite promised, much cake and liquor was served. It was a chore cleaning up the theater to make it presentable for the movie playing there that night.

For the next year’s invitation, I reached out to my close friend Nini Lyons, a wonderful photographer, and we cooked up the idea for the cover picture. We would get a birthday cake with my name on it and I would stand over it with an axe. I remember getting all dressed up at Nini’s store Remembrances Of Things Past on Commercial Street and borrowing an axe from a friend and hacking at the cake over and over until we got the right shot, which was difficult because we were laughing so hard. The selections that year was angora-loving Ed Wood’s cockamamie I Changed My Sex (aka Glen Or Glenda) with Bela Lugosi. His cinematic plea for tolerance about transvestitism is always mind-boggling to watch, if just for Lugosi sitting in a chair bizarrely repeating “Pull the strings…pull the strings!”

But it was co-feature- The Wild, Wild World Of Jane Mansfield, that made my party guests berserk. It plays like a demented travelogue as we follow movie star Jayne Mansfield around the world, visiting nudist camps, drag balls and topless car washes. We even get to see Jayne do the twist. But the capper is that they actually include her death in the film and follow husband Mickey Hargitay, who walks sadly around their bedroom and pink heart-shaped swimming pool, gazing longingly at the high-heeled shoes she will never step into again.

Now later that winter I was watching TV and saw an ad for a horror movie and it was an axe smashing into a birthday cake. The movie was entitled Happy Birthday To Me. I thought it was just a weird co-incidence until the next summer when a woman approached me at the movie theater and wondered if I liked the fact that they used my birthday invitation as the ad campaign for the movie she worked on. Suffice to say, she was never invited to another party.

The following year Nini photographed our friend Linda stepping into a birthday cake in a high-heel shoe. I truly felt bad having Linda climb up on a table and jam her foot down on the birthday cake over and over until we got the right shot. But, as always, she was gracious and good-humored about it.

The first movie I picked that year was, and is, one of my all-time favorites- Wicked Woman. It stars Beverly Michaels as Billie Nash, a mean waitress who conspires with a handsome married man (Richard Egan) to get rid of his drunken wife. Michaels lopes through each scene (often all in white), and has the best way with a wise-crack (director Hugo Haas used her in his early films like Pickup).  One of my favorite scenes is when Billie gets a room in a seedy rooming house and she saunters up to and knocks on a stranger’s door because she can smell a steak cooking in there from down the hall. The other movie I showed was another favorite- Private Parts, a great Paul Bartel film about a young woman who goes to stay at her aunt’s rooming house in San Francisco and finds the place is loaded with perverts of all kinds- even a man who has an inflatable female sex doll that he injects blood into. The movie is fabulously bizarre and fun.

Also, on my invitation I jokingly said to bring raw meat or liquor and a lot of people actually brought all this raw meat which they later drunkenly threw down at tourists from the open theater window. Police came. It was a big mess.

For the next summer Nini photographed me in a party hat with a gun to my head. It was to be my last screening party because, after ten years living on the Cape I was I finally moving to New York. I chose two lulus. Deadly Weapons, Doris Wishman’s film starring well-endowed burlesque queen Chesty Morgan as a woman who gets revenge for her husband’s murder by killing those responsible with her massive breasts. Wishman’s bizarre editing style (many cut-away shots of feet) and Chesty’s outlandish outfits and halting delivery made this one a scream for the audience.

The co-feature was another Russ Meyer film- Motor Psycho. Now what was so great about this print was that it was from Russ Meyer himself. He was kind enough to lend me his 35mm print if I promised to take good care of it. I actually stayed in the projection booth during the run of the film, and while I could hear the howls of laughter from the crowd (probably during the scene where Haji sucks the snake venom from a man’s leg),  I was staring at Meyer’s film going through the projector, terrified that something bad would happen to it. I diligently sent the movie back but it was over Labor Day weekend and didn’t arrive on time causing Russ Meyer to call screaming at me for 20 minutes on the phone. I was so heart sick. Here was a director I really loved and he personally hated me. The next day I nervously called and he was jolly and laughing, saying that he was having a drink with the mailman and that the movie had arrived safely. All was fine with the world, but I was a wreck.

I do miss the parties though. But if you have a movie you love, a blu-ray player, and a lot of liquor, you can still do small screening parties. There are plenty of fucked-up films out there you can horrify your friends with, and turn the unhappiest day of the year into a triumph. Then you can blow out those candles and cry “It’s my party and I’ll screen if I want to.”