Embodying the Past: Citing and Circulating Celebrity

Celebrities such as Joan Crawford and Elvis are very much alive today in theaters, night clubs, and performance spaces. Images of stars from the 1940s and the 1950s are recreated by drag kings and queens, professional impersonators, performance artists, and even mainstream actors long past the lifetime of the original celebrities. Many of these performances are reiterations, repeating cultural images of historical celebrities and celebrating a nostalgic image of a bygone era. Even in supposedly faithful reiterations, the cultural significance of the imitated celebrity changes with the time period and audience, but some performers intentionally reinvent ideas about the U.S. culture and identity through their performances of historical celebrities. The performances of drag queen Lypsinka and queer Chicano Elvis ‘interpreter’ El Vez serve as particularly apt examples through which to investigate the implications of revising and recreating a historical personage to address contemporary identities. By critically recreating the historical performances of Joan Crawford and Elvis respectively, Lypsinka and El Vez interrogate the ideals of the past as they perform. The temporal distance between past celebrity and present performance allows contemporary performers to assert identifications with the past while enacting and analyzing contemporary identities.

One of the most familiar traditions of performing celebrities appears in the work of drag queens who perform historicized gender practices through cross-gender identification. Celebrities serve as gender icons, allowing impersonators to perform identification with film stars as both celebration and critique of the genders performed by these celebrities. Contemporary imitations of past icons of femininity and glamour denaturalize “gender as a historical category” (Butler 9), making the cultural specificity of gender more visible. For example, by performing the 1940s glamour of Joan Crawford, which looks significantly different from glamour and femininity today, Lypsinka implicitly critiques the styles and values of both historical and contemporary eras. While stars such as Joan Crawford represent glamour and celebrity, they also suggest a reception of the era to which they belong as it relates to contemporary issues. By performing celebrities specifically from the 1940s and 1950s such as Joan Crawford and Elvis, contemporary performers critique the restrictions of historical gender roles while celebrating performers who challenged the expectations of gender and sexuality in the past.

The 1950s appear in the cultural imaginary as the triumphant era of U.S. prosperity, optimism and security, and the American nuclear family prior to the disruptions of feminism, the Civil Rights Movement, and gay liberation. A great deal of U.S. drama is centered around the image of the nuclear family as “isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and protected against impending doom by the wonders of modern technology” (May 3), an image which emerged against the background of postwar prosperity and the containment of the Cold War. These myths of the past define contemporary visions of the 1940s and 1950s, and they can either be repeated nostalgically or critically deconstructed and reimagined. The performances of Lypsinka and El Vez particularly critique the ways in which the post-World War II period solidified U.S. identities, particularly the conformity to narrow gender identities and the ways in which popular culture continues to repeat and reinforce those identities today. These performers enact the social codes of the past while illustrating how even cultural icons failed to fully enact identity expectations of the period. Faye Dunaway and Lypsinka both demonstrate how Joan Crawford failed to embody post-World War II ideals of motherhood, while El Vez exploits Elvis’s challenge to the expectations of middle-class white masculinity. Their performances may celebrate identification with the celebrity being performed, but it also demonstrates the ways in which identification with mid-century American culture can be translated into subcultural performances that critique contemporary identities. By focusing on how performances that recreate past cultural icons establish both a celebratory and critical relationship to their subjects, I will examine how these impersonations question the primacy of historical identities by making visible their influence on contemporary identities.

Genealogies of Joan Crawford: Faye Dunaway, Charles Pierce, Lypsinka

During her lifetime, Joan Crawford was known for her hard work at maintaining her celebrity, making visible the effort behind the image of stardom. Crawford made over eighty films over the course of her career (Robertson 87) and rose from a working class background to star as a working mother in films such as Mildred Pierce (1945). From the beginning, she was a manufactured celebrity known for “the total slogging away at all aspects of her image and her embodiment of the ethic of hard work” (Dyer 7). The name “Joan Crawford” was itself the result of a contest to give former chorus girl Lucille Le Sueur a more all-American image (Allen and Gomery 176). In her films, Crawford frequently played independent women who worked for a living. In Possessed (1931) she played a factory worker; in The Women (1939) she played a shopgirl; and in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), she played a working-class woman determined to raise her social status through her sexuality and mob connections. These roles made Crawford an icon for working women. Pamela Robertson argues that the visible labor behind Crawford’s stardom signified differently in the 1940s and suggested her independence,[1] but in later iterations of Crawford’s image, her role as a self-made star would become the subject of critique and ridicule.

Crawford is a famous subject of drag performers and other imitators. Physically, she lends herself to impersonation with her distinctive appearance that includes broad shoulders, large, red lips and thick eyebrows. Throughout her career, she was “associated with a single ‘look’: heavily lined eyes, emphasized cheekbones, dramatically outlined and darkened lips, and, especially, the square shouldered dresses and ‘masculine’ tailored suits designed for her by MGM’s top designer, Adrian” (Allen and Gomery 183). On Crawford, especially early in her career, this signature look communicated glamour and elegance, but when imitated by others, the same characteristics become garish signifiers of artificiality. They are easily exaggerated and well-suited to male bodies and therefore expose Crawford to critiques of her femininity. Charles Pierce, for example, “the most successful drag performer of his generation” according to queer performance theorist David Román (159), performed drag impersonations of the “Leading Ladies of the Silver Screen,” from the early 1950s until he retired in 1990. His imitations of Crawford emphasized her broad shoulders. He wore exaggerated shoulder pads on top of his already broad male shoulders, and dramatically gestured with his arms and upper body. He similarly drew attention to his lips by claiming, as Crawford, “My lips could dismantle a tractor – and have” (Pierce). The features that appeared fashionable on Joan Crawford in the 1940s have become the same symbols that invite imitation and ridicule by later performers, making Crawford a particularly appropriate target for drag performances.

The most famous imitation of Crawford, however, is not by a drag queen but by actress Faye Dunaway in the 1981 film Mommie Dearest, a film based on the tell-all book written by Crawford’s adopted daughter, Christina. This film plays an important role in the reception and perpetuation of Joan Crawford’s image and has greatly influenced later performances. John Waters describes Dunaway’s portrayal of Crawford as “a female female impersonator […] this is a drag queen role” (“Joan Lives On”). Dunaway’s performance emphasizes the effort and labor required to construct Joan Crawford’s star image and reiterates Crawford’s characterization as a hard-working and independent woman. It also emphasizes her failure to appropriately embody the expectations of motherhood and nuclear family so closely associated with post-World War II femininity.

Dunaway’s performance draws on Crawford’s historical image as interpreted both through Crawford’s films and through the unflattering image created by Christine Crawford’s biography. Mommie Dearest opens with a brutal depiction of Crawford’s rigorous beauty ritual, in which she wakes up at 4 AM, scrubs her face with scalding water and then plunges it into ice. Over the course of the film, Crawford appears exercising excessively, applying and removing makeup, and being dismissed by studio executives who believe she’s too old for leading roles. In some of her most notable breakdowns in Mommie Dearest, Crawford scrubs floors and hacks away at a tree in her garden. Her intense physical labor, the toll that her work takes, and the frequent rejections she suffers become part of her persona. As a result, lines from the film such as “No more wire hangers!” may be more familiar to contemporary audiences than those from Crawford’s own roles in films such as Mildred Pierce. Although later performers interpret Crawford’s life and performances through Dunaway’s portrayal in Mommie Dearest, Dunaway also draws on the performative repertoire of exaggeration established by drag queens who criticize and pay tribute to Crawford as a gender role model.

John Epperson, who performs in drag as Lypsinka, serves as an heir perpetuating Charles Pierce’s performance of famous Hollywood leading ladies and Dunaway’s iconic revision of Crawford’s image. Lypsinka performs in a style more critical and more postmodern than Pierce’s; she performs extended scenes and monologues (not usually songs) from interviews with the celebrities she impersonates. By adapting traditional drag performance techniques such as lipsynching, she perpetuates a tradition of drag performance in which stars that represented 1940s-style glamour are both celebrated and mocked, but she also returns to the original source material of the celebrities’ own words and voices. As Charles Isherwood claims in his review of The Passion of the Crawford, “Miss Crawford’s own contributions to movie history will never be entirely forgotten, certainly not as long as Lypsinka is around to repackage them for consumption by new generations” (B 16). By repeating Crawford’s image for new audiences, Epperson emphasizes her hardworking glamour that resists traditional femininity and reaffirms Crawford’s place in gay male culture.

Lypsinka adapts previous drag portrayals of Joan Crawford in order to be more directly critical. Departing from a drag tradition of performing many characters in one show, Lypsinka devotes an entire performance to Joan Crawford in The Passion of the Crawford, in which she complicates Crawford’s legacy as previously portrayed by drag queens and by Faye Dunaway. The performance features an extended interview Crawford gave in 1973 that was later released on LP (Dodds); Lypsinka performs the entire show lip-syncing to Crawford’s own words from this interview, interspersed with occasional poems and flashbacks to images of Crawford as a mother. The subject matter evokes Crawford from Mommie Dearest, drawing upon the audience’s knowledge of that film while using Joan Crawford’s own words to both support and counter Christina Crawford’s image of her mother as portrayed by Faye Dunaway.

The performance, however, puts the image of Crawford as bad mother and struggling actress in dialogue with projected images of her as a hopeful young starlet in early roles. Lypsinka’s rendition of Joan Crawford indicates Epperson’s identification with her throughout the several stages of her career, but he also implicitly critiques Crawford’s reserved behavior in interviews in contrast to her confrontational images on film. Of his performances Epperson claims, “I’m trying to present Crawford as more complicated and real than the usual drag-queen caricature, but Joan Crawford is never completely real” (qtd. in Dodds). Epperson’s postmodern collage technique intersperses various sound and film clips within the context of the longer interview, which challenges audiences to identify Crawford in various films throughout her career, while also preventing even avid Crawford fans from relying entirely on the pleasure of recognition. This attempt to portray Crawford as complex and sympathetic, while still drawing on grotesque caricatures of her whether originated by herself in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? or by Faye Dunaway in Mommie Dearest, critiques exaggerations and demonizations of Crawford in popular culture by allowing her to speak for herself, but it also demonstrates the historical basis to popular images of Crawford as a strict and overbearing mother as depicted in Mommie Dearest.

Lypsinka plays one more vital role in perpetuating the legacy of Joan Crawford; she has become an expert on Crawford’s image. In 1998, Lypsinka appeared as Joan Crawford with Christina Crawford as part of an onstage interview promoting the re-release of the book Mommie Dearest and presenting some of the material that would eventually appear in The Passion of the Crawford (Dodds). For recently re-released DVDs of Mommie Dearest and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, the discs’ special features include interviews and commentary by Epperson. By serving to perpetuate Crawford’s image both through performance and through expert commentary, Epperson establishes himself as an authority on Joan Crawford and represents her public image in contemporary culture.

By acting as Joan Crawford not only on stage but also in public performances, Lypsinka becomes a surrogate for Crawford, recreating her legacy and taking her place as a representative of the 1940s film star. Performance theorist Joseph Roach argues that “culture reproduces and re-creates itself by a process that can be best described by the word surrogation” (2). This surrogation “requires public enactments of forgetting, either to blur the obvious discontinuities, misalliances, and ruptures, or, more desperately, to exaggerate them in order to mystify a previous Golden Age, now lapsed” (3). Lypsinka, in the process of becoming surrogate for Crawford, emphasizes Crawford’s gender practice at the height of her film career in a Golden Age of U.S. culture.

Lypsinka’s performance of Joan Crawford is just one example of contemporary performers enacting their identification with a historical celebrity through a critical reiteration of the celebrity’s cultural legacy. These performances allow the contemporary celebrity to enact a complex performance of contemporary identity filtered through the historical celebrity as cultural antecedent. Lypsinka performs Crawford’s toughness and deliberate identity construction in order to fashion her own image as hard-working drag performer and celebrity icon. Epperson’s performance as Lypsinka acts as a tribute to Crawford’s role in shaping his own gay male identity while simultaneously critiquing the gender roles and celebrity culture through which both Crawford and Lypsinka are confined to specific performances of identity. Similarly, Robert Lopez’s performance as El Vez critiques contemporary cultural situations by drawing parallels between Elvis in the South in the 1950s and Lopez as a gay Chicano punk musician in Los Angeles. By drawing on Crawford or Elvis as a historical icon, the contemporary identities of Epperson and Lopez are filtered through characters shaped by the cultural and historical contexts of the 1940s and 1950s respectively. By paying tribute to Crawford and Elvis as historical inspirations, each performer critiques contemporary identities and cultures through the performance of their historical antecedents.

The Globalization of Elvis

“To act Elvisly is to think globally”

--- Robert Lopez (qtd. in Rubin 217)

Enshrined as “The King of Rock and Roll,” Elvis remains an icon of American music and 1950s culture. His image recurs in contemporary culture everywhere from postage stamps to TV biographies.[2] When Robert Lopez, a gay Chicano punk musician, takes the stage as El Vez, his performances critique Elvis’s cultural legacy as a symbol of American music and American identity. He identifies as an “Elvis translator” rather than an “Elvis impersonator,”[3] suggesting that even though El Vez performs mostly in English (with some Spanish), he is translating Elvis’s performance across time and culture. Through El Vez, some of the ideas and ideals represented by Elvis are translated for a contemporary audience profoundly different from Elvis’s original 1956 audience. Lopez reworks Elvis’s hits[4] to address issues of Chicano race and culture, particularly on the U.S.-Mexico border of Southern California, drawing attention to contemporary issues frequently ignored or omitted in nostalgia for 1950s rock and roll. An El Vez show combines Catholic imagery, drag show pageantry, and punk rock anarchy to discuss political issues of identity and culture. Through Elvis’s persona, El Vez critiques nostalgia for 1950s Americana and the U.S.’s perceptions of itself in a global context.

Historically, Elvis has come to represent the 1950s in the United States. His performances originated at the intersecting tensions around race, class, gender, and sexuality. His enduring status as a representative of American popular culture commemorates the historical significance of those tensions. He personifies youth and explicit sexuality at a time when an older generation was trying to keep both under control. Only slightly less overtly, Elvis serves as a complex representation of the racial tensions within the U.S. in the 1950s. As a white performer who learned from and drew upon African-American musical and performance styles, Elvis’s success can be interpreted as white privilege combined with the appropriation of African-American culture. For example, African-American musicians originally recorded songs for which Elvis became famous, such as “Hound Dog” and “Mystery Train.”[5] El Vez circulates Elvis’s history of class disadvantage and racial privilege within his own performances. Lopez claims, “Elvis is taking black music and making it white, and I am taking white music and making it brown” (Rubin 216). Through El Vez’s performance personality, Lopez appropriates music that already carries multiple layers of cultural memory and erasure and applies it to Chicano culture.

Joseph Roach reverses accusations of Elvis’s erasure of the African-American musicians who preceded him by emphasizing what remains from African-American culture within Elvis’s music: “its cadences, its intonations, its accompaniment, and even its gestures” (Roach 69). Roach goes on to claim “the degree to which this voice haunts American memory, the degree to which it promotes obsessive attempts at simulation and impersonation, derives from its ghostly power to insinuate memory between the lines” (Roach 69). Elvis becomes a surrogate symbolizing the forgetting of the African-American heritage underlying rock and roll, but his music creates a cultural memory which makes those African-American sounds symbols of American culture. By attributing Elvis’s cultural importance and repetition to the simultaneous memory and erasure of the African-American antecedents of Elvis’s music and gesture, Roach demonstrates the cultural tension within these performances, upon which recent performers build in order to interrogate similar issues within their contemporary cultures.

El Vez draws upon Elvis’s significance at the center of racial and cultural turmoil as well as his iconic status to interrogate nostalgia for 1950s Americana and the U.S.’s perceptions of itself in a global context. Through this history of cultural appropriation, El Vez layers new meanings on top of Elvis’s already extensive significance within U.S. culture. Thus, the memory of African-American culture ‘erased’ by Elvis is once again doubled, emphasizing its similarities with contemporary Mexican-American culture. Lopez’s queer Chicano body both implicitly and explicitly critiques the assumptions of U.S. identity through identification with Elvis as an American icon.

As a symbol of white heterosexual American masculinity, Elvis challenged the acceptable limits of sexuality in the 1950s. His pelvis became the source of controversy and outrage, earning him the nickname “Elvis the Pelvis” after a performance of “Hound Dog” on The Milton Berle Show on June 6, 1956. Elvis’s position at the center of tensions regarding explicit sexuality resulted in his legacy as an icon of rock and roll masculinity. Simon Frith and Angela McRobbie, for example, describe Elvis as a definitive artist of what they call “cock rock” (Frith and McRobbie 374). In Love and Theft, Eric Lott categorizes Elvis’s performances as minstrelsy in which, Lott argues, “what appears in fact to have been appropriated were certain kinds of masculinity” (Lott 52). New York Times television critic Jack Gould described Elvis’ performance on The Milton Berle Show as “a rock and roll variation on one of the most standard acts in show business: the virtuoso of the hootchy-kootchy. His one specialty is an accented movement of the body that heretofore been primarily identified with the repertoire of the blonde bombshells of the burlesque runway” (Gould 67). By equating Elvis with a (white) female burlesque performer, Gould attempts to undermine the power and danger of his sexuality, but also draws attention to the fact that the same gestures interpreted by fans and rock critics to be explicitly masculine can also be read as feminine. The legacy of performative masculinity with which Elvis is historically associated represents a particular interpretation of his performance that reinforces the association of rock and roll with heterosexual masculinity.

In his performances as El Vez, queer sexuality is the least visible aspect of Lopez’s identity. Lopez subsumes his own open homosexuality into a performative heterosexuality of the El Vez persona.[6] According to Lopez, “I’m gay, but El Vez is straight” (El Rey de Rock and Roll). The music video for “En El Barrio” begins with El Vez being fondled by several girls in a car. On stage, he flirts with and sings to women in the audience. These performances of sexuality, however, adopt the pageantry and camp of queer performance.[7] The over-the-top spectacular costumes particularly evoke the performativity of a drag show while asserting masculine sexuality that troubles the borders between identity categories.

El Vez performances feature no less than 6 full costume changes (Habell-Pallán 181). His costumes frequently suggest Elvis’s famed jumpsuit but often in vinyl, velvet, gold lamé or even tiger stripes.[8] The spectacles of color and fabric exaggerate Elvis’s already excessive costumes with campy playfulness. In addition to his Elvis costumes, El Vez has appeared dressed as Santa (frequently, for his annual Christmas shows), President Bush, an Aztec god and Uncle Sam. The “G.I. Ay! Ay! Blues” show featured El Vez in a camouflage jumpsuit and khaki uniform suggesting images of the Brown Berets, Ché Guevara, and Elvis in the U.S. Army. The combination of U.S. military and Mexican revolutionary images juxtapose two different types of aggressive heterosexual masculinity, but tight, hip-hugging sailor and police officer uniforms resignify Elvis’s heterosexual masculinity by combining it with a spectacle of queer masculinity reminiscent of the Village People. While Elvis’s ostentatious show of masculinity is recorded as explicitly heterosexual, El Vez inflects that masculinity queerly.

Despite El Vez’s claim to heterosexuality, he uses his performances to speak out against homophobia and religious conservativism. For example, performances directing “[You’re Nothing but a] Chihuahua” at Jerry Falwell or President Bush specifically condemn these figures for their anti-gay bigotry. El Vez specifically includes gay rights and anti-homophobic messages into songs such as “Aztlán,” in which he specifically includes “anyone regardless of sexual orientation” (Habell-Pallán 194) in his version of the Chicano homeland. El Vez turns Elvis’s song, “Rubbernecking” into a performance advocating safe sex. His message about condom use is not particularly queer, especially when directed at women in the audience (El Rey de Rock and Roll), but it does draw on a history of queer performance in response to the AIDS epidemic and the high visibility of safe-sex advocacy in queer contexts.[9] Without explicitly claiming his homosexuality onstage, Lopez makes it visible both through his performance of queer masculinity and through his inclusion of queerness in his critique of power structures affecting race, class, gender, and nation.

Lypsinka and El Vez adopt the characters of historical celebrities to perform both an affinity with the histories their respective celebrities represent and a critique of historical identities. They extend the legacies of Joan Crawford and Elvis in order to comment on contemporary identities, particularly drawing attention to the ways in which performances of race and gender change across time and cultural location. By re-embodying icons from the 1940s and 1950s such as Crawford and Elvis, Lypsinka and El Vez bring historical performances forward to the present critically. They encourage a critical re-evaluation of contemporary issues as they are reflected through historical parallels, forcing audiences to re-evaluate contemporary identities through their identification with the past. These performances expose the continued influence of 1940s and 1950s ideals, while demonstrating the ways in which these expectations can be challenged through the performance of critical identification with the past.

Notes 

Works Cited

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---. Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular Culture. New York and London: New York University Press, 2005

Isherwood, Charles. “Channeling the Fame and Folly of an Icon” Rev. of The Passion of the Crawford. New York Times. 7 May 2005: B1+.

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Schoemer, Karen. “Love that blue suede sombrero: Robert Lopez’s culture-crossing take on Elvis Presley impersonation, known as El Vez.” Newsweek. 4 Nov. 1996: 78.

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Wallraff, David. From Drags to Riches: The Untold Story of Charles Pierce. New York, London, and Oxford: Harrington Park Press, 2002.

Washburn, Jim. “To El Vez, the King Will Always Be ‘El Rey.’” Los Angeles Times. May 5, 1994: F2.

Winn, Steven. “Legendary Drag Performer Charles Pierce Dies.” The San Francisco Chronicle. 4 June 1999: D4.