From The Third Eye

When I arrived at the premiere of Charles Henri Ford’s new film, Johnny Minotaur, Paul Morrissey, the director of Trash, came running over to the cab. “You can’t get in,” he said. “They’re already too crowded.” I was surprised by the number of people who had come to see the film, but even more by who they were. Waiting in the congested lobby of the Bleecker Street Cinema, hoping to crowd into one of the few remaining seats, were Robert Gorham Davis and other academic critics I recognized from Columbia; Richard Lorber, Sol Yurick, and other radical writers; as well as Holly Woodlawn, the now short-haired Jackie Curtis, and other representatives of the Andy Warhol Theater of the Ridiculous Underground. There didn’t seem to be any outward consistency to the crowd, either in appearance or position: German Prince Egon von und zu Fürstenberg standing in tailor-made sport jacket at the head of the line talking with the radical Sid Bernard. I couldn’t imagine what we all had in common, why the similar interest in the film. I knew Charles Henri Ford to be an early symbolist poet and long-time friend of Gertrude Stein, and I had come to the film because it was supposed to be colorfully erotic and perverse. The film and the party given afterwards were revealing about all who were there. And, more importantly, they showed what has happened to underground culture in America, how sated, jaded, and corrupted it has become.

Johnny Minotaurwas preceded by Jean Genet’s short but legendary Chant d’amour, and I, along with Fürstenberg and others, managed to get in and sprawl out on the theater floor just before the film was to begin.

Johnny Minotauris a celebration of decadence, an indulgent personal fantasy of sex, spiritual death, and physical dissolution. Shot entirely in Crete where Ford spends his summer months, it consists ostensibly of a rambling montage about the making of a film, an ongoing examination into the “whys” and “hows” of its own creation. Even on this level the fatigue and narcissism of the film are evident, its self-consciousness not appearing contrived, but merely acquiescent. As if to say, “What else is important?”—“What else is there to do?” Johnny Minotaur, like an old man masturbating, intent on himself, looks only within itself. And the vision itself is not new, the obsession with sex and the body that of a jaded voyeur. We see Nikos, a seventeen-year-old Greek boy whose dark eyebrows run across his face like a caterpillar. We see him playing like a child with some boys of his own age, then later, his tan, tightly muscled body brought closely into view, watch him simulate masturbation with a curved rubber cock and tell of his visits to local whorehouses, an enticing smile on his face. Ford, interviewed in the film about his interest in Nikos, claims he wants to adopt him, says he would “expose him to things” and “see about his education.” He admits under questioning that he is also interested in Nikos sexually. Nikos is not the only body explored. Two teenage boys wrestle naked—one of them repulsively obese, the loose flesh around his stomach hanging over his cock—and give one another a soap shower afterwards. We see two boys fucking on a bed, a crowd of bronzed sun-worshipers on the beach, and in the scenes I found to be most erotic, two dancing sailors with hustler-smiles and tight baskets, their starch-white uniforms heightened by the dull light, and Ford’s beautiful niece Shelley Scott (she’s Ruth Ford’s daughter by Zachary Scott) swinging nude in a hammock, her white breasts and triangle at her crotch set off by her dark-oiled tan. “It is tempting to be promiscuous in this part of the world,” one of the film’s many voices says. Again, it seems nothing else matters. Not the totalitarian dictatorship existing at that very moment in Greece. Not the world removed from beaches, beds, and still-sandy bodies. Nothing but self-absorption and the perpetual pursuit of pleasure.

“At the JOHNNY MINOTAUR opening. Photographs left to right: Taylor Mead and Charles Henri Ford; Candy Darling; Mrs. William Buckley and Dotson Rader. ‘I couldn’t imagine what we all had in common, why the similar interest in the film. How … corrupted our underground has become.’” From Evergreen Review No. 92, September 1971.

There’s a quiet desperation to Johnny Minotaur, apparent not only in its hedonism and indiscriminate search for satisfaction—in one scene a boy humps a pin-up of Jayne Mansfield and then fucks a melon he has carved a hole in—but also in its flirting concern with death. The whole Minotaur theme, introduced late in the film as if to give it some general meaning, only reinforces the sense of personal dissipation. The mythical significance of the Minotaur is related in stilted, academic tones, but Allen Ginsberg (he, along with Salvador Dalí, is among the narrating voices) explains its particular relevance to the film when he associates it with a kind of spiritual death and more precisely the dissolution of the body. “In killing the Minotaur,” he says, “one kills oneself.” Death is the ultimate stage of decadence in Ford’s fantasy, and we see it when Johnny (a good-looking artist) paints a skeleton on the body of a naked boy, and even more vividly when one of Ford’s young men symbolically castrates himself. Perhaps castration represents the fear of women in the homosexual vision—the Minotaur is a beast hiding in the cunt-like labyrinth—but it also may signify the total satiation and release of sexual need. A mask of the Minotaur is burned at the end of the film, and in the same way that it approaches destruction do the characters in the film verge on the loss of themselves. Johnny Minotaur is about the abandonment of standards, the giving up of self to luxury, pleasure, and physical desire. It is revealing as a study in corruption.

The party given in Ford’s honor after the film was most fitting. Held in a loft studio down in Soho, it was crowded with over a hundred guests, both the filmgoers and others. While a long line formed waiting for the beer and wine, young writers and filmmakers smoked grass and danced, and Charles Ford’s friends huddled around to congratulate him. His actress-sister Ruth Ford and Mart Crowley, author of The Boys in the Band. A bubbling Sylvia Miles from Midnight Cowboy, and Hortense Calisher, the writer. Ronald Tavel, who has written some of the best underground theatrical drama, was standing next to a worn-looking Tennessee Williams, and Sid Bernard, whose gray hair was all madness, spoke to Williams about the film. “I only go to dirty films,” Williams said smirking, “and I liked Johnny Minotaur.” But Williams was obviously pissed by Bernard’s interruption because he was working at nagging out of Dotson Rader a hustler’s price—forgetting a moment that he, Williams, had recently very publicly converted to Catholicism and turned his back on the things of the flesh, and forgetting, too, that he had a weak alcoholic heart—and Rader laughed because Tennessee had taken his novel (Gov’t Inspected Meat) as fact. Holly Woodlawn, star of Warhol’s Trash, kissed everyone hello, Prince Egon Fürstenberg smoked a drug called Angel Dust along with several pretty models, and Candy Darling danced wildly in her silver hot pants. It wasn’t the mood or the action that made the party an appropriate aftermath for the film. Rather it was the combination of people. Curiously mixed to begin with, it became even more strangely diverse when Peter Glenville, the upper-class English director, arrived with Mrs. William F. Buckley, wearing a full-length dress. The underground, rebelling for the last fifteen years against the sterility and hypocrisy of straight culture, suddenly seemed terribly weak and flaccid. And, like one of the interviewers in Ford’s film who yawned while watching a love scene between two boys, it seemed cynical and bored.

Mrs. Buckley talked to many of the radical writers there. Knowing that she was somehow not out of place at the party, that the underground had more in common with her class than with any other, and wanting to make a point out of it, she turned to Rader before walking away. Smiling, her eyes shining not unlike her husband’s, she said, “Darling, there’s one thing you should realize. When the Revolution comes, after they get me they’ll be coming for you.” Après moi le deluge!