CHERRY VANILLA, TONY ZANETTA

PERFORMER

Cherry Vanilla by Leee Black Childers, circa 1975.

On March 29th, 2026, I moderated an earth shattering panel featuring Cherry Vanilla and Tony Zanetta—two Off Broadway trailblazers who had also been part of David Bowie’s management team during his Ziggy Stardust persona. Ziggy was not only a fictional character; it was also a radical shift in how music, theatre, and androgyny were blended together to redefine identity as well as performance.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, queer culture was not just surfacing; it was exploding alongside protests against the Vietnam War, the Black liberation movement, and the women’s movement. This explosion was taking shape in Downtown New York City in the newly created Theatre of the Ridiculous performance genre, where performers used camp, drag, satire, and extravagance to reject social norms and make a statement on creative freedom by using performance as liberation—offensive, challenging, and fearless.

— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project

August Bernadicou: Cherry, you grew up in Queens in New York City. Did you recognize the diversity around you, or was it more of a sheltered childhood?

Cherry Vanilla: It was both. I recognized the diversity, but my parents tried to keep me very sheltered. Because my mother worked at the Copacabana, I got to know a whole other side of life than what I knew in Queens. In Manhattan I was introduced to nightlife and movie stars and performers. I was lucky. My older sister, Margaret, was also a nanny for Don Ameche. Don Ameche was a huge actor back then. She was a nanny for his two girls. They lived at the Croydon in New York. I had these other lives that I checked in and out of.

I stayed with the Ameches sometimes in this fancy hotel with room service and everything. I got to go to the Copacabana sometimes and meet Dean Martin and see his shows and see all the expensive clothes and jewelry. Then I had, in Queens, this railroad flat: five rooms, one right after another, like you're on a train, no privacy at all. My parents were very Catholic and very lower class. We were lucky. We always had food and I always felt sheltered and protected, but we were basically really lower class. I recognized the diversity, and I knew where I wanted to go when I grew up, which was just across the river to Manhattan. The world of difference.

August: Did it make you want to enter show business, being surrounded by all of that?

Cherry: Yes, it did. I couldn't express to my family how much I wanted to be in show business because they were like, "Just learn how to type, be a secretary and be a housewife or something." They were not encouraging it. Although when they came to see me perform with a rock band, finally—what was that place called? Remember that place? Lewis Friedman's place, Tony?

Tony Zanetta: Which place?

Cherry: Remember the bar Lewis Friedman opened? It was in Snafu. My parents came to see me, and they were thrilled to see me on stage.

Tony: Did they ever see you at Reno Sweeney?

Cherry: No, nor any of the plays. My sister saw me in one of the plays where Tony Ingrassia had me naked. Of course, he had me naked in most of them. I was peeling an orange on a lounge chair. Remember that? Putting the peels between my thighs.

Tony: That was Island.

Cherry: That was Island. Patti Smith was in it.

Tony: Your sister came to see World too, I think.

Cherry: Yes, she came to most of the plays. She brought her friends from Gypsy. They laughed their asses off. They were shocked. When I learned about her little secret life, she shouldn't have been so shocked about her little secrets.

Tony: Cherry and her sister were very much alike. They looked alike. They sounded alike, but they lived in totally different worlds. It was always interesting to have Mary come around.

Cherry: My other sister, Margaret, you never met, Tony.

Tony: No, I never met Margaret.

Cherry: She was really from another world because she was 11 years older than me. She really came from a different world. Mary was five years older. We were a little closer. Mary didn't help me enough when I needed help. She helped me somewhat. I almost committed suicide because of Mary, because I was basically homeless. Luckily, not for very long. A friend took me in. I really didn't know where I was going to sleep that night. I had nothing. My sister Mary, I don't speak to anyone. She's the only living relative.

August: Tony, how did you learn about the word homosexual?

Tony: Life magazine’s 1964 article about homosexuality. I knew the word homosexual. In high school, I was reading Jean Genet, along with Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. and Giovanni's Room and Another Country by James Baldwin. I became aware of homosexuality through reading. The thing that was shocking to me, because I knew that there were gay men, although the word gay wasn't really around yet, was when I read Giovanni's Room, which is really a love story between two men. It didn't occur to me that men would fall in love with each other. I knew that they would have sex with each other, but it didn't occur to me that they would kiss and actually have a romance until I read that. That was shocking to me.

I remember reading, I think it was Life magazine, it was an article about Fire Island. The word gay was just beginning to be used. That was fascinating to see that there was this place called Fire Island and that there were people who identified as gay. At the time, I really didn't know that I was gay. I knew I was different. I just thought I was an artist. I thought I was bisexual, but I didn't really know that I was gay. I grew up in a small town, but we had a gay bar, the Buccaneer Lounge, which I probably first went to when I was 17. Buccaneer was like two of everything. It was like Noah's Ark, like old men, lesbians, gay boys, all different.

The queen of the Buccaneer Lounge was J. Roy. J. Roy was like the most beautiful boy in Jamestown in Upstate New York. He would tell you that—really. Just have them look for the most beautiful boy in town. He was very flamboyant, and he was very defiant and in-your-face. J. Roy never hid being gay. He would ride around Jamestown in his big Cadillac convertible picking up boys because in those days, especially in a town like that, again, it wasn't about romance or finding a boyfriend. It was about trade and having sex.

J. Roy was out there advertising. Everybody in town knew J. Roy. He worked in a factory. He was totally gay in the factory. Then he worked in the post office. He was totally gay in the post office. It was segregated. If you were gay, you were in this category, and you were not going to get out of that category. He was the town queen. I really got to know what gay was by going to that bar.

Then, later in college in Buffalo, my friend Tom Carberry, who was my roommate, who later introduced me to Tony Ingrassia and Candy Darling—because he grew up in Massapequa—became my gay mentor. We would go to the bars in Buffalo and Rochester. Then I moved to New York City.

August: Cherry, what was the anti-war movement like, and what did it mean to be liberated in the late '60s and early '70s?

Cherry: Liberated sexually?

August: Any form.

Cherry: It was a time when a lot of things were new. Disco was new. Marijuana for a lot of people was new. LSD was certainly new. It was a time of integration. Instead of just being a gay bar or straight bar, nightclub, or restaurant, you had people, the straight people wanted to go to the gay clubs because you'd always dance with somebody there. Straight guys didn't always dance, but gay boys in a gay club, you could always dance with them, and you could go there on your own. It was a mixture. It was like straight people were getting to know the lives of gay people, and gay people were getting to know—they unfortunately knew, growing up, the lives of straight people.

I was basically imitating gay boys when I got liberated because, for a woman, you're a whore if you're going to have sex with everybody. I, like Tony, wasn't thinking about men falling in love with each other. I was just thinking they were being naughty, sexually. If they could do it, why couldn't I do it? You didn't have to be gay to be liberated and just want to have sex. You didn't have to be falling in love. Although I fell in love with a lot people I had sex with.

I didn't realize at the time that it was brave to admit that you were a whore. You liked sex and you picked up guys and you weren't a dirty skank, as older generations would say about you. I hung out with a lot of gay boys, especially in the theater. All the underground theater had tons of gay boys. I didn't really even realize that women could be gay until I was quite older. I thought it was only for men first. I had a cousin, Bobby, who was gay. My parents, they didn't use the word gay. They said “fairy.” They said, “he flies like a fairy.”

Tony: Fairy was the big word.

Cherry That was the big word. Then Jimmy, who worked at the Copacabana, wore electric blue eyeshadow. He was swishy, such a doll. Such an incredible guy. I know they said, “he flew.” What I realized was that these people that they were saying flew were my favorite people because they were great guys. I was really drawn to hanging out with a very gay crowd. Being liberated got easier because I started being with more and more gay people. They were all liberating themselves. I, as a woman, was still liberating. It should be LGBTQW.

Then a lot of them were activists—the actors that you worked with and the directors, you formed a social circle with them. You had people to go to the marches with, and you could do things for entertainment against the war. You could take a stand. I remember when we were over in London, Tony, remember the Oz trials were on? The Oz trials were about how three magazine editors were put on trial for obscenity in the 1970s—and how their convictions were later overturned. They got permission from John and Yoko on their petition. I don't know if you got to sign it. I got to be one of the names on it and stuff.

You could find political ways through showbiz to be an activist without doing as much work as you're doing these days, because—I found it social to be as politically active as I was, which wasn't extreme. It meant going to the bigger marches in Central Park and voting Democrat. It wasn't a challenge so much. I don't know if it's just me and being older, but it seems such a challenge to live and enjoy now. Such a challenge. It was easy to enjoy back then, wasn't it easy? It was so much easier to be joyous.

Tony: Yes. A lot of it had to do with the fact of baby boomers. In 1964, the huge segment of the population was 17 years old. We all grew up in post-war America. Post-war America was booming. We had things that our parents didn't have. We had transistor radios and record players and money to spend and bicycles. We were spoiled. We were not going to be told what to do by anybody. We were very defiant.

It was in our nature. It was in the nature of the generation. Plus, what happened in the mid-'60s, the pill, which liberated women, that was the first thing that liberated women because it was a big deal to get pregnant when you were 13, 14, 15, 22. Suddenly, that was not such an issue. Women could be liberated sexually. There were all these different things happening at the same time.

Cherry: Can you believe now—abortions and trying to stop people from having birth control in this day and age? Isn't it like—.

Tony: No, I can't believe it. It's unbelievable.

Cherry: Everything that's happening in the world is unbelievable right now. I never thought I'd live to see this. Like I say, God bless everybody who can find joy in it. I hope young people can because we did.

Tony: Because we grew up in such a time of expansion of freedoms, of all kinds of freedoms. We just thought that was going to go on and on and on. It's shocking what's happening now. Absolutely shocking that we are in such a repressive moment in society.

Cherry: Expansion and integration, like I said, because even then, it didn't matter if you said you were a Democrat or a Republican. We didn't even talk politics. We left that to the professionals, we thought. Now, I don't know. The inmates are running the asylum.

Tony: Like Cherry just mentioned, the Oz trials in London, which was about censorship. We were naive and a little bit oblivious because they used us as part of that politicizing of being anti-censorship. We didn't realize that what we were doing was totally anti-censorship because Pork, the play that we were in, had a lot of nudity in it. It had a lot of talk about sex and all sorts of things that were still pretty taboo. We were more out there doing it rather than campaigning for it. We were doing it, and not even realizing what we were doing.

Cherry: Just having a lot of sex in those days for a woman or gay people, that was an act of rebellion. I looked at it like that. Like, "Fuck you, I'm going to fuck who I want when I want as much as I want."

Tony: You were more vocal about it. I think a lot of women were beginning to do that, but they didn't talk about it as much as you did. You were very loud and proud about it.

Cherry: Because I wanted to impress all my gay friends.

Tony: You did.

Tony Zanetta by unknown, circa 1970.

August: Tony, can you talk about the 1967 play Gorilla Queen?

Tony: Oh, Gorilla Queen. I saw Gorilla Queen. I was about 20 or 21 years old. Gorilla Queen was written by Ronnie Tavel. Ronnie Tavel and John Vaccaro created the Play-House of the Ridiculous. Then they had a fight about Gorilla Queen because John was more about the visual. Ronnie was a writer. Gorilla Queen was all puns and double entendres. One of the characters was Karma Miranda. One of the characters was Tahara Nugi White Woman. I just found it as a 21-year-old, the most hysterically funny thing that I had ever seen. Kind of shocking, I guess, because everything was a double entendre.

Tahara Nugi White Woman was this big guy, sort of in drag, but he was in native drag with a coconut brassiere or something like that. He was hairy. He was this big hairy guy in semi-drag. He was sort of the star of the show. Tahara Nugi White Woman. I loved that play. I can't remember specifics about the play other than there was another line, something about lamb shit that I thought as a 20-year-old was hysterically funny. Ronnie Tavel was a very, very good writer. He had written the scenarios for Andy Warhol's screenplays.

That's how he got together with John Vaccaro, because it was a play he wrote, and Andy didn't want to film it, so he took it to John. They staged it. I think it was Kitchenette. I don't remember exactly which play it was. They staged it, and they called the company the Play-House of the Ridiculous.

August: How did the two of you find the play World, and what was it about? Maybe Cherry?

Tony: Yes, what was it about?

Cherry: We never knew. Jayne County, who at this time was Wayne County, wrote World: Birth of a Nation, and it was supposed to take place in a male abortion ward on another planet. This is 1970. All the lines were made up of lines from song lyrics, so every line in the play came from a song. It was very clever and very crazy because nobody knew what it was about. It was very fast-moving and full of symbolic gestures and costumes and lines.

Tony: The official title was, this is 1970, World: Birth of a Nation, a Homosexual Fantasy.

Cherry: Oh, I forgot that part, yes.

Tony: I always forget it too, but that was part of the title.

Cherry: People who came didn't know what it was about either, but it was the height of LSD, right, Tony? People who came, they were on acid. They would come back three and four times to see it because if you were on acid, it was fantastic because it was so insane. You didn't try to figure it out. You just accepted it. Half the times we were on acid, or at least I was, Tony wasn't such an acid person.

Tony: Remember when Prindeville Ohio came to rehearsal on acid? That was a fun afternoon. Prindeville Ohio was the leading ingenue of the play. She was sort of a semi-Warhol starlet, and she was half Black, half white, and she was a trip. She wore clothes that I think she literally picked out of the garbage. She wore a weird white wig, white platinum wig, always white makeup, but she had great style. She was literally dressed in drags from the street, but she looked incredible. Jayne County wrote World.

Jayne grew up in a Pentecostal home. She was very much into Pentecostal religion—Herbert W. Armstrong. I can't remember the name of the magazine. When she was a child, she wanted to become a biblical archaeologist. Jayne is very, very well versed in the Bible, biblical history. The play had not only song titles, but references to the Bible that only Jayne probably understood. I don't know what she was talking about. The characters were John Wayne, Kate Smith, Jefferson Davis, Dr. Louis Pasteur, Florence Nightingale, and her twin sister, Sharon Nightingale. Cherry was Tilly Tuns. That's not really a historical character that I'm aware of—Christopher Columbus. Who else?

It was total madness, but it was very well done. Jayne and Leee Black Childers were roommates. For a long time, Jackie Curtis lived with Jayne and Leee. Jackie wrote with a cut-and-paste method that—William S. Burroughs always did his books with a cut-and-paste method. Jackie's plays were cut-and-paste. Jayne had been in Jackie's play Femme Fatale the year before we did World. Tony Ingrassia directed both plays.

Jayne tells a great story about their first appearance on stage in Jackie Curtis's Femme Fatale. She makes her entrance, and she picks up her skirt, and she takes a rubber shit out from underneath her skirt, and she says, "Good Lord, you sure scared the shit out of me." Something like that. Anyway, it was funny the way she tells it. Her book is a great reference for that period of time.

Now, I totally lost my train of thought because Jayne tells a lot of—I'm going to skip around for a second. She tells great stories about being in Atlanta in the '60s, in terms of being gay, and how she and all the other queens used to go around wrecking people, which meant they would be as outrageous and flamboyant as they possibly could. They would literally wreck people until these straight guys would start chasing them.

They just got great pleasure out of—run away after they had wrecked whatever. That was common in the gay community, being as much of a fly—as Cherry talks about the fairies flying. You would fly in their face, basically. You would just be as outrageous as possible to shock them and to get a reaction. That was wrecking.

August: Cherry, how did you find the play Pork, and what was Pork about?

Cherry: Pork, which came out in 1971, was actual telephone conversations.

Tony: She didn't find it. It found her.

Cherry: They had done it in New York at Café La MaMa. I wasn't in it then. The producer and Andy were looking for somebody to replace the lead actress. She was a Broadway actress, and they wanted, like Tony was talking about before, they wanted people like us who were more performers than actors. Tony Ingrassia suggested me to Andy Warhol, and I had an audition with Andy at the Factory. That's how I got the part. What it was was telephone transcriptions, correspondence between producers.

Tony: Again, they were cut and pasted together.

Cherry: They were transcribed by Patty Hackett, who was the secretary at Andy Warhol’s studio called the Factory, and Tony Ingrassia edited them down. They were actual conversations, but they were between two crazy people, Andy Warhol and Brigid Berlin, Brigid Polk. They were talking about different kinds of shit, like bird shit versus people shit, versus they were talking about plate jobs, where you poop on a glass plate over a man's face.

Also, Brigid's mother was a society woman from Park Avenue, so they were also talking about her mother's dinner parties. Brigid had abortions, so they were talking about abortions. The plays I had been in before that, like World, I had one or two lines here and there. This was like, I was on stage almost the whole time, but Tony and I had pages of dialogue, pages.

Tony: Because Cherry played Brigid, and the play was based on transcriptions of phone conversations, mainly between Brigid and Andy Warhol. Brigid was a speed freak. She just talked on and on and on and on and on.

Cherry: Conversations like it would start off being about her mother's dinner party on Park Avenue, and it would go into her abortions, and then it would go into different kinds of shit. To memorize these lines was like—Tony, he had the best part. He played Andy Warhol. He just sat at a table and said, "And then what? Then what?" When I would sit looking at him at the table, I'll never forget the moment of fear and anxiety. I look at Tony like, "Please, I'm so lost. Please give me a hint. Say something back to me that I don't know what…” It was a challenge to do it. It was great.

Tony: All these different characters entertaining Andy.

Cherry: Yes, we all tried to get his presence. It's funny when I work—.

Tony: I'm sure you know about this. Two or three years before Pork, because Brigid Polk introduced Andy to the use of these little tape recorders, these little cassette recorders, you could plug into your phone, and we could record telephone conversations. They always were recording each other and everybody else. Brigid, a couple of years before, at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre, did a one-woman show called Brigid Polk Strikes! Her Satanic Majesty in Person.

She stood on stage—actually, I think she had a bed on the stage, just like we did in Pork. She was on stage calling people up, and the audience could hear the phone conversations, although the person on the other end of the phone didn't know that they were being recorded and that the audience could hear. In the middle of the whole thing, she called businessman, philanthropist, and producer Huntington Hartford. She told him that she thought she was just fat, but it wasn't that she was just overweight. She was pregnant, and she needed money for an abortion. Could she borrow $500? He said, "Oh, sure, whatever." He said, "Come up and get it."

She left the stage in the middle of the performance and said, “Intermission,” and went up to Huntington Hartford. She came back 20 minutes later with the cash in hand, and the show went on. Andy, I think, got the idea of Pork from that thing, from Brigid. The thing with Pork also is—because Andy used to pay Brigid $25 a tape. He would pay her for her tapes. Then Patty Hackett would transcribe all the tapes. In Pork, you can't really tell. It's really impossible to tell whose tape it was. Was it Andy's tape or was it Brigid's tape?

Pork has never been done again, and it's never been published. I think because there's a big publishing issue, like who do these tapes belong to, Andy or Brigid Berlin? Plus, Ingrassia complicated it by putting conceived and directed by Anthony J. Ingrassia on all the scripts and everything. Unfortunately, Pork has never been done again, which I think is a shame because it really captures a piece of history. It's the rhythm of the way people talked in the '60s, and it's what they talked about in the '60s. It's fascinating if you look at it now to see what the conversations were about.

August: What was the reaction?

Cherry: In London or in New York?

August: In London.

Cherry: A lot of people walked out. We sold out at the beginning, the first shows. We were going to have a much longer run and try to go to the West End, but eventually the crowds thinned down because we got crazy publicity. Of course, they were calling us all kinds of terrible things. They thought it was just too much, just too dirty, too much.

Tony: It was a lot in the press, for sure. It was a sensation. Warhol was very, very hot. I think Flesh and Trash were being shown in London, but they couldn't be shown in the movie theater because of this thing about censorship. They could only be shown in the private cinema club. The whole thing about Pork also, that's overlooked, is Warhol was having his first big retrospective. He had it at the Whitney in New York when we did Pork at La MaMa. It opened at the same time as his retrospective. Then that retrospective was moved to London, to the Tate, and it opened while we were in London. In some ways, Pork was a publicity vehicle for the exhibit. It only made him, as an artist, more interesting because he was working in all these different mediums, film, stage, painting, silk screens, all that. I feel that Pork was really PR for Andy.

August: Did you think you would cross over? Did you think it would go mainstream?

Tony: Yes. Cherry got a job. Right?

Cherry: Yes. What was that playwright's name? He was famous.

Tony: Oh, I'm blanking out. He was very well known at the time.

Cherry: His play was called AC/DC or something like that. He was a great playwright in London. He was a little bit on the edge of being outrageous, but acceptable to them. He was going to stage his play again. I think it was the hit play he was going to stage again. It had been staged before in London. Both Jayne County and I went to him and auditioned, and we were both given parts in a straight-up kind of play for London to stay there and do it. I think it was in the West End.

Actors' Equity would not allow it because I think it was only a two-character play or something. They weren't going to let two Americans be the whole cast of a play. When we brought Pork over, we also hired English actors. We got permission from Equity. We all got to join Actors' Equity. Unlike a lot of people who were in more home movies, we got Actors' Equity salaries because we were actually needed and everything.

Tony: We were taken more seriously in London, for sure. I saw a couple of agents, and there were a few nibbles, but nothing really happened. In New York, I couldn't. When I came back, I thought that would continue. Of course, it didn't. That was that.

Cherry: We did that, thinking it was going to bring us good luck, the next step, whatever. We were open to accepting any kind of theatrical work in those days, especially if it paid. We were doing stuff that didn't pay very much, if anything. Except the Warhol. We got Actors' Equity salaries and a beautiful apartment we all lived in.

Tony: We had a great summer. We were there all summer. We had a fabulous apartment. We had salaries. We had the best time.

August: What did you do during the day?

Cherry: Rehearsed.

Tony: I don't remember. Do you?

Cherry: We rehearsed a lot.

Tony: We rehearsed a lot, yes.

Cherry: We'd go to the park. I used to go to the park a lot.

Tony: Not everybody from the New York cast went. Eight of us went because of the union laws. Some of the cast was English. We rehearsed with them for quite a while, actually, because we went in June. The play opened in August. It was about four weeks of rehearsal. That's quite a bit for rehearsing a show.

Cherry: The thing is, we stayed up late at night because we all lived together. How many of us in our apartment? Six, five?

Tony: Seven.

Cherry: I had a whole rock band living in my bedroom. They used to come when they played London. The whole band would stay in this tiny bedroom, body to body on the floor. I was having sex with the lead guitarist, of course. We had so much fun. We stayed up, like after we'd come home from doing the play, or from being out at the Hard Rock on a night off, or from the Hard Rock after the play. We stayed up late and hung out, just entertaining each other at the apartment a lot. We probably slept pretty late in the day most of the time. I don't remember us getting up at 7:00 AM or anything like that.

Tony: Oh, no. We were stars in London. We would go out every night. We would meet everybody. The subways close at eleven o'clock, and you needed to have enough money to go in a taxi. The restaurants, the clubs stayed open late. Again, you needed money to go to all those places. The scene was very small. You could meet everybody in London in the first two weeks, which we did. We hung out with Sal Mineo, Jill Hayworth, and Amanda Lear, and I don't know. Bud Cort.

Cherry: Bud Cort, I loved him. We went to the Hard Rock. The Hard Rock Cafe was opening its first-ever cafe at the same time we were opening in Pork. Right away, it was a huge hit. The lines were just down the block. So at the Hard Rock, we just strolled right up to the front.

Tony: We'd stroll in.

Cherry: Oh, we just, no lines for us, baby. When we were in there, we'd get up on top of the tables and dance. They wouldn't stop us at all. We'd have sex in the bathrooms. Oh, my God.

Tony: You did. The rest of us never did.

Cherry: With the owner. With the owner, I did, to make sure we were treated right.

Tony: He was so sexy. You see, the Hard Rock Cafe was a new thing for London because it was casual American food, burgers, blah, blah. Restaurants in London were more formal. This was like a whole new wave of what was going on in London. It did become really, really popular right away.

August: How did you start working with David Bowie and his management company MainMan.

Tony: First of all, when we were doing the play in New York, there was an article about Andy and the Factory in that month's Rolling Stone magazine. I used that Rolling Stone magazine as a prop in the play. I'm there as Andy, and I'm reading about the Factory in Rolling Stone, blah, blah, blah. In the back of the magazine was a little article with a picture of this boy, this singer who was wearing a dress. He was wearing a man's dress. I thought that was like, "Ooh, who's this boy in the dress?" He was supposedly straight. He had a wife and this, that, and the other thing. Anyway, that was David Bowie.

Fast forward, Cherry in London, and Leee—Cherry was doing a column. She was saying she was doing a column. She might have done a couple. You have to tell us. It was called Cherry Vanilla with Scoops for You for Creem magazine. She would call up the record company and say that she and Leee wanted to come and see the concert. She was going to do a review, and Leee was going to take pictures.

Cherry: Would they send a car, please?

Tony: They would.

Cherry: They would, and that was great. We went to see Bowie play at a little place at the edges of London called the Country Club. Rick Wakeman was on piano, Mick Ronson was on electric guitar, and Bowie was on acoustic guitar, and that was the whole band. It was this tiny club, still a hippie crowd in a way. There had been a lot of folk music there. Rock and roll, too, but mostly it was a transition time, because even Bowie was transitioning, because his stuff, Hunky Dory, was still sounding kind of folky.

Tony: He wasn't wearing a dress.

Cherry: No, he was wearing a beautiful silk shirt, turquoise foil royal pants, yellow patent leather Mary Jane shoes, and a beautiful hat with a feather. He looked gorgeous, but he was definitely in—he was half in women's clothes. Of course, we introduced ourselves: Jayne, Leee, and I. We went there. Angie Bowie, she's like—I don't know. Angie is bigger than life—she doesn't get the credit she should get for David's career. Right away, she made friends with us. She had a personality where she could zero in on people. You became friends. She was cool. She took us into their inner circle, so to speak. Tony got to know them on one kind of basis.

Tony: He was married to Angie at the time. They just had a baby.

Cherry: Yes. You had sex with both of them.

Tony: Not until a little later. Angie invited me to their house. They came to see the play. They were fans of ours. We were bigger than David Bowie was.

Cherry: I know.

Tony: Angie did. She just zeroed right in. We went out with them. We went to the Sombrero. They were this married couple that hung out in the gay disco, the Sombrero.

Cherry: You went to their house a few times?

Tony: I went. Then Angie invited me to come for Sunday lunch. That was a big thing of Angie's. Angie's younger than me, but she seemed like a dowager. She seemed—.

Cherry: She was in charge, very in charge.

Tony: Very in charge and very aggressive. She had a personality that would change. She could be little and small, or she could be very British, or she could be very American and loud. Anyway, she invited me for Sunday lunch. She said they'd send a car. I thought that was weird because I was like, "Why don't you just give me the address? I know how to take the tube." I didn't realize that they didn't live in London. They lived half an hour, 45 minutes out. They lived in a town called Beckenham.

Anyway, they sent a car. I'll never forget being in that car. The driver was this little woman. She came wearing a uniform. She came to the flat, and she knocked on the door. I went into the car. I'm sitting in that car thinking, "I don't know where the fuck I'm going." It was like cast your fate to the wind. "Oh, well, here I go. I don't know where I'm going." That was the beginning of a great adventure, certainly, because I went to their house, spent the day with them. We connected. We really connected.

I didn't realize a lot of things. I didn't realize that to them, we represented a certain thing about New York: Warhol, Lou Reed. I never met Lou Reed, but they projected all this stuff onto us. It wasn't totally for real, but they thought we were like the entry into New York for them. As it turned out, it was true. We were the entry to New York for them. We became close over a period of time. Shortly after we came back to New York, or I did, you were still in London, they came to New York to sign the record deal with RCA Records. This was really, totally a time of transition for David.

His manager, who was very key in this, Tony Defries, who we ended up working for, was very key, certainly. He was doing this deal with RCA Records. They came to New York in September of 1971. They called me because they didn't know anybody else. Plus, they wanted to meet Andy. That was the subtext of all of this. In the meantime, I went out with them. I went to the record signing with them. Then there was a big dinner after in this restaurant in New York. Lou Reed was there, and Lisa Robinson, who was a major rock and roll writer, was there. Then afterwards, David and I went with Lisa to the club Max's Kansas City. Danny Fields was there.

At Danny Fields’s apartment was Iggy Pop. David was obsessed with Iggy and Lou Reed. Now he meets Lou Reed earlier in the evening. And then Danny calls Iggy, who was staying in his apartment, to come to Max's to meet David. One day, actually, David signs with RCA Records, he meets Lou Reed, and he meets Iggy Pop. Next day, I took him to the Factory. He met Andy Warhol. I don't know. What else do you want—then I stayed in touch with his manager. Every time his manager came to town, he would call me. I would go out to dinner with him.

Cherry and I started—he would send us to the record company once the record came out. We would pass records out. We became like a little PR machine for him, not knowing that that's what we were doing. We were giving press kits to our friends. We were giving records to our friends. We were talking about him to our friends. We were kind of like anointing him with this hipness, in a way. I don't know about you, but I didn't know what I was doing. I just thought, "Oh, how nice he's giving us these records to pass out." We were passing the records out to all these—what would they call them now? Influencers. We were influencers. We didn't know we were influencers.

Cherry: He used to have room service meals at the hotel. And wine.

Tony: Yes, it was always the Warwick Hotel. We'd sit there for hours drinking wine and eating.

Cherry: He paid you some money already. In those days, when we were just going to the hotel a lot to see him when he came to town, I wasn't getting a penny.

Tony: He'd give me $100, $200. That's part of why I was going. I was flat broke.

August: What sort of things did you guys do for him?

Cherry: Introducing him to—.

Tony: You know, a weird thing that I just remembered that I did? I went to 37th Street and bought a rhinestone machine because they were putting rhinestones on all the cases. Stupid stuff like that and rhinestones, and sent them off to England. It was mainly like passing out press kits and records.

Cherry: Filling Tony in on who were the DJs, and the music managers, and the concert promoters, and the lighting people, and the sound people. We gave all—.

Tony: It evolved into a whole thing. Then he had me go to this lawyer, pick up $5,000. With that $5,000, I was supposed to find an apartment that he could use when he stayed in New York, and he would use it as his office. I rented an apartment at East 58th Street. 240 East 58th Street. That became our first office. Anyway, eventually, stuff began to heat up because David was in the process of becoming Ziggy Stardust. He was doing dates in England. They were all coming to New York. There was stuff going on in this office. There was nothing in the office except a couple of phones.

Oh, Tony would be in New York, and I'd be running around with Tony, but we needed somebody to sit in the office to answer the phones. First, I asked Cyrinda Foxe to answer the phone. She could barely press the button to answer the phone. That lasted, I think, one day. I thought, "I know who could answer. Cherry could answer the phones, and she needs money. I'll call Cherry." Cherry can answer the phones, but—again, I'm totally oblivious. Cherry was the only one that ever had a job, really. Cherry produced TV commercials and radio commercials. Cherry knew how to type. Yes, she knew how to answer a phone. She knew how to do everything in an office.

Suddenly, she came to answer the phones for a few days. She put the whole office together and became indispensable to Tony Defries because she did everything, while we then were getting it together to go on the road. Then I went on the road with David and became the road manager, but Cherry was the office. She wasn't answering the phone. She was the office. You can pick it up from there. Am I wrong? Did I tell it right or not?

Cherry: Well, yes, eventually, because I had the patience to address any inquiries we got about him. Tony Defries set up this image with two bodyguards in karate uniforms and stuff, because everybody was trying to get at David.

The people we did get through to, like Lillian Roxon and Lisa Robinson, all those people from Max's—and more people they turned on—and porn magazines and all this, when they would call the office, I would deal with them. Now, mind you, we didn't have Wikipedia or any of that stuff, AI, then, so I knew very little about David, actually, because I didn't have years to study his background and know about all his tracks and what his lyrics meant and blah, blah, blah.

These people called. I would just make up stuff when they called. I had the patience to talk to anybody who called. If they would say, like, "What did David mean by the third Bardot or something," and I'd say, "Oh, that was probably a little hint to Brigitte Bardot." I didn't know that. I made that up. I became the PR lady because that's who they got on the phone. I got to hire some friends, like Dorrie, and Raquel came.

Tony: Well, that came slightly later, but in the beginning, because Cherry had been a producer, she knew how to get a lighting designer, number one. I remember calling—you got C Factor, you got Bob C. She knew how to put stuff together that none of the rest of us did.

Cherry: More acting. You guys were more acting.

Tony: Well, then Leee also—see, it was just Cherry, me, and Leee in the beginning. Leee and Tony Defries and I went out to dinner. We went to Pete's Tavern. At the end of dinner, while Leee is jabbering away, blah, blah, blah, Tony looks at me and says, "Well, Z, I think we found our advance man." Leee and I looked at each other. We didn't know what an advance man was.

We sent Leee on the road because by this time David's about to come to America to do our first tour. We sent Leee on the road as the advance man. Leee didn't know anything about being an advance man. There was a list of stuff he was supposed to do. The thing was, it was genius because Leee, I don't know if you ever met Leee. He's been gone for quite a few years now.

Leee had this magnetic personality. Leee was actually just a very nice person. People gravitated towards Leee. Leee would get to, like, Cleveland. Within two days, he knew everybody in Cleveland. He knew where to go, what restaurant, what bar. He was on a first-name basis with everything. He was actually the perfect advance man. We evolved into this touring unit.

Cherry: Then remember, as we got to hire some more people to take over the office work, I went on the road too and did like, I'd go—.

Tony: That was the second tour.

Cherry: The second tour. I would find out what dry cleaners would stay open late in Cleveland and where the gay bars were and go see a disc jockey or two while I was there to promote the concert. Then I'd get on a plane and go back two days later to see the concert and stuff. I was loving it because I got to see a huge number of the shows on that second tour.

Tony: It was great. We toured the whole country. Did you ever know Bob Damron's Address Book, or was that gone? Well, in those days, there was something called Bob Damron's Address Book, which was the gay guide to the United States. Sometimes he had international ones too. For every city, he had a list of all the bars, baths, meeting places, and cruising spots. Anything you wanted in terms of a gay person, Bob Damron had in this little book. I used that little book.

We used that little book as a guide for everything that we were doing. We had postcards made. Remember the postcards with the band on the cover? We would send them to every gay bar across the country saying that we were coming to town. We would sign it, "Love, David Bowie." We would sign the damn postcard. We were pretty good at doing his autograph. He never knew we did that, but we did do that. Whether it did any good or not, I don't know. We did spread awareness about him. That's for damn sure.

August: Can you talk about the album Wayne County at the Trucks! How did it come together?

Tony: Because Jayne County and I went to Pete's Tavern and had lunch, and we made the whole thing up during lunch.

Cherry: I didn't work for MainMan by that time. Remember?

Tony: Well, you kind of—yes, you did. You had the radio and TV film department.

Cherry: I still had that then?

Tony: Yes, because you filmed the whole goddamn thing, remember? You sat on that truck outside with Bob Menna.

Cherry: Yes. When it happened, instead of a limousine, we came in a truck, and it lowered us down, Bob Menna and everybody. I wore Don Ameche's wife's emerald green dress.

Tony: Let me tell you the story because there's a lot of misunderstanding about it, even on Jayne's part, particularly on Jayne's part. I'm sure she's not watching this, but if she is… Jayne and Leee were roommates for years. Something had happened in the West Village. Jayne felt she was being threatened on the street one night, whatever, whatever, whatever. By this time, we had moved out of that apartment on East 58th Street. It was a cute little duplex. Tony Defries told them they could move into the duplex, so Jayne and Leee moved in.

Leee and Jayne were very good friends. Leee was always very responsible in terms of rent. He kind of took care of Jayne. Jayne didn't really have a job most of the time. Basically, what happened was Leee or MainMan was supporting Jayne. Not totally directly, but indirectly. Jayne, in the meantime, had Queen Elizabeth, her band. They were doing pretty good, actually. Leee was doing all this stuff for Jayne anyway. Leee and I thought it would be great if Jayne became a MainMan artist.

Number one, there were other MainMan artists besides David by that time, but every MainMan artist had come through David, not through us. Now, we are telling Defries we thought Jayne should be a MainMan artist. He was kind of so-so about it. It was like, "Well…" Our attitude was, "Well, we're supporting Jayne anyway, so why not just make Jayne an artist and blah, blah, blah." He agreed to it. We were supposed to do it all, but we didn't know how to do anything, really, still.

We knew how to do some things, but not how to do the important things, like get Jayne a record deal. Jayne and I came up with this scheme because—by that time there was a place called the Mercer Arts Center in New York. The New York Dolls, Jayne County, Ruby Lynn Reyner, Eric Emerson, they were all stars in the Mercer Arts Center, but the Mercer Arts Center collapsed. It was before Max's and CBGBs had started, but there was this New York rock scene happening. Jayne was pretty involved in that.

Jayne County and Queen Elizabeth were pretty much at the top of this rock scene. I thought, "Well, we could make Jayne even bigger if we do a theatrical show," because I always wanted to do theater. I was Mr. Theater. Jayne County and I had lunch at Pete's Tavern, and we came up with this idea to do, like, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, we would do—instead of Gidget Goes Hawaiian, we would do Wayne County at the Trucks!, because Jayne did go to the trucks.

You know what the trucks was? It was like a big sex place. At night, there's empty trucks near the West Side Highway. All the gay guys would go and have sex in the trucks, including Jayne County. Our little idea of a fun title was: “Wayne County at the Trucks.” We came up with this show. I rented a theater at Westbeth, which was right next to the trucks. It was going to be by invitation only. We invited 400 people. It was fantastic. It was a great show.

Cherry: Then I hired Max to direct and put the budget together and start to shoot.

Tony: Well, then it began to get—First of all, I budgeted the whole thing at $10,000, which wasn't bad. It wasn't that much money. We served champagne and chocolate coins. We had one floor that was like a reception place. We had dancing. We had this big table set up with the champagne and little chocolate coins. Then the other floor was the theater where we had the show. Tony Ingrassia directed the show. Cherry and Max filmed it.

It began to get carried away. From the $10,000 theater show, now we're filming it. We're recording it. We had all these things packed down into a movie, live album, blah, blah, blah. It mushroomed out of control pretty quickly. What else do you want to know about it? Why was it shelved? Because MainMan got tired of spending money, I think. It went from $10,000 to $250,000.

Cherry: I think what scared Tony about me having that little film company for a while was that he thought I was getting carried away—because of the Mick Ronson concert film. We had six cameras at that concert. People traveled to London. I forgot the budget, but it was peanuts compared to—.

Tony: That's Mick Ronson's, right?

Cherry: Yes. I remember Tony commenting that I was getting carried away because it was too expensive or something. In those days, I forget what our budget was. It was nothing because we were shooting 16mm, not 35mm. Tony is so brilliant, Tony Defries, but he should have let me film, get another—whatever it took— $100,000. It wasn't even anything like that. That Mick Ronson Slaughter on 10th Avenue commercial cost $3,000.

Tony, as magnanimous as he was about getting limos and putting on shows and karate people and all this kind of stuff, limousines and things, he should have let us film more because all that stuff today—instead of us sitting here talking, we'd be showing other generations what we did and how little money we did it for and how courageous we were in the content of everything.

Anyway, that's too bad, but maybe—the footage after I left the company, Tony Z had given me a different space from MainMan. Remember, I had that little loft you found, where you guys went to Park Avenue? I wasn't around there as much. I was in my loft. All of a sudden, I had a film company, but it was MainMan Productions. I was going to film everything. We had a movie called Fabulous. We were going to do the monthly meetings and whatever. Anyway, it's just too bad it doesn't exist because—.

Tony: This is getting a little bit out there, but it got caught up in—Tony Defries was a bit of a megalomaniac. I think he gave himself more credit than he deserved because—it's hard to explain this. He kind of thought he created David Bowie when he didn't at all. He didn't.

Cherry: We all created David Bowie.

Tony: Well, we all contributed, but David Bowie had a lot to do with it himself. You know what I mean?

Cherry: Yes.

Tony: Tony kind of forgot about that. The focus—Tony thought he could do anything, but then, in the meantime, everything became like, there were too many things going on at one time, and then not enough attention being put into them, and then not enough follow-through being put in. We would start these things and get halfway, and then he would pull out. It was like—.

Cherry: The rumor was that a lot of stuff we did shoot—I had put it in Fort Lee, New Jersey, in a storage place, temperature control, and all that. A lot of the stories we heard were that Tony got tired of paying those storage bills or something, put them in a closet. I don't know, just so they maybe would be worthless, brittle over the years. I don't know, but I'd like to see more of that.

Tony: Both of those movies, the Mick Ronson movie and the Wayne County at the Trucks! movie, would really be something today. They would be really worth having today, for sure

August: Tony, what do you remember about Agosto Machado? He just died on March 21, 2026.

Tony: I met Agosto in 1970. Through the years, I saw him perform with all the stars and leading companies of Downtown theatre: Jackie Curtis, Ethyl Eichelberger, the Play-House of the Ridiculous, the Cockettes, the Hot Peaches, Rumi Missabu, John Justin, and Tabboo! His humility and shyness always kept him out of the center stage spotlight. He was always a bridesmaid, never a bride. He was a good friend—supportive and loving. What people need to realize is that he saved everything: photos, programs, bits of memorabilia from all those shows, and all his friends who had passed. He was deeply spiritual and believed he would one day be reunited with all of them. His small one-room apartment was filled with the detritus of these otherwise forgotten souls. He constructed elaborate shrines to preserve their memory. A few years ago, his shrines and installations were discovered by the gallery Gordon Robichaux. The shrines are now on view at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney in New York.

August: What do you remember about Ruby Lynn Reyner?

Cherry: Tony would know much more because he did plays with her before I ever met Tony. I have one little story about her. Tina Bossidy, who was the stylist who made Madonna's wedding look and all that, she helped me with costuming sometimes. I had these little bodysuits made by this wonderful guy. One of them was white stretch satin, like we used to use girl material in those days. After I finished doing rock shows and wearing those little costumes, Tony Ingrassia needed costumes for a play he was doing, for Ruby Lynn Reyner.

Now, she was about three sizes smaller than me, so these costumes look really funny on her. She put underpants underneath and stuff like that. The only thing I remember is I was supposed to be lending these costumes to the play. A year or whatever it was later, these two junkie guys were selling the costumes with my name embroidered on the inside. They were selling them for junk on the street. People said, "Oh, Cherry…" I forgot these were two famous junkies. They said they were selling-–right there on the street—the costume that Ruby Lynn had worn. Ruby probably sold it to them, and they were selling—that's my Ruby Lynn story.

August: What do you remember about Jackie Curtis?

Tony: Well, I'll tell a quick little story because it's my favorite Jackie Curtis story. It has to do with what we've been talking about. The apartment on East 58th Street, the duplex, the MainMan office. One night, Cherry and I are at Max's Kansas City. At the time, Cherry had a roommate. She lived with Hal Fredericks. Hal Fredericks was a fascinating guy. He was a Vietnam vet or Korean, I think, whatever. He was hurt in the war, and he was in a wheelchair. He was also a country singer at the same time.

Cherry: He was a beautiful artist.

Tony: He what?

Cherry: An artist. He made all those gorgeous paintings.

Tony: Oh, yes. He was an interesting guy. Cherry and Hal were at Max's. I'm at Max's, and Jackie's at Max's. I had just gotten this apartment on East 58th Street. I was wanting to show it off. We had been at Max's. Do you remember this night? You might not.

Cherry Vanilla by Joel Schumacher, circa 1975.

Cherry: Yes.

Tony: I invited them all to come up to East 58th Street. We go outside. Hal went out with his wheelchair every night. It was nothing for him to be wheeling around New York City. He could get in and out of cabs by himself and all that. We threw the wheelchair into the cab, and we went up to East 58th Street. Now, the apartment was on the third floor, and it was not an elevator building.

I picked Hal up and carried him up to the third floor. We're looking at the apartment, and Jackie, da-da-da. Then, after a while, I had a little bit of red wine, I will admit. After a while, Hal and Cherry left, leaving me and Jackie. Jackie—I don't know what. Jackie was just speeding away, speeding away, speeding away. I'm getting tired from the red wine.

I go upstairs, and I lay down on my bed. Jackie comes up, and she's sitting on the edge of my bed. She's talking and talking and talking and talking. I fell asleep. I wake up in the morning, and she's still sitting there talking and talking and talking. The doorbell's ringing. I totally forgot that I had an appointment with a telephone company to install the phones that morning. I answer the door, and this guy comes in.

He's the telephone installer. He's kind of hunky. He's young, late 20s, maybe early 30s, big Irish guy. He comes into the apartment and starts installing the phones. In the meantime, Jackie's still wandering around the apartment talking and talking and talking. She's dressed as a man, but then she takes her shopping bags—she always has shopping bags with her. She takes her shopping bags out, and she's got clothes and makeup. She starts putting makeup on, and she's changing into this old house dress.

The telephone guy is in the corner giving me the side-eye, like what? Then he calls me over, and he says, "Is that your girl?" I said, "No." Finally, he gets the phones installed. By this time, it's like noon, one o'clock, bright sunny day on East 58th Street, and Jackie is smeared with makeup and a beard showing through, and God knows what she's dressed in.

Now she's going to go Downtown. In the meantime, we had been talking, and one of the things she said was, "I don't want them to say, 'Who's Jackie Curtis?' I want them to say, 'What's Jackie Curtis?'" Now we go outside. I'm going to walk her downstairs, and she's going to get the Second Avenue bus to go Downtown. We go downstairs, and this block is all decorators and antique shops. We go downstairs, and all the decorators are like peering out. There's like a little gathering of them across the street, like, looking and staring.

Jackie walks down the street to get her bus, and she gets to the corner. This one decorator who I knew came up to me, and she said, "What was that?" She did say, "What was that?" Not "Who was that?" Anyways, I think it's a funny story.

Cherry: Jackie was very brilliant.

Tony: Jackie was totally brilliant. Agosto Machado said the best thing about Jackie—because he was in Vain Victory and a couple of things with Jackie. He says, "Jackie's theater was alive." You couldn't look at it like a regular play or regular theater or criticize it the way you would normally, theater, because it changed all the time. It didn't stay the same. It changed because it was living. It was more like an event than theater. Jackie was absolutely incredible on stage. There was just something about Jackie that was totally magical.

August: What does it mean to be on the cutting edge in 2026?

Tony: Be careful you don't bleed too much.

Cherry: Well, I'm certainly not there, and I don't care. I'm too old for it. I guess, like Tony said, influencers. I guess it's people who got control of the internet when it started, when they built this.

Tony: Yes, but the difference is money. We made money. It made money. We weren't doing any of this for money. We were doing this for passion and for love. Now everything, the bottom line is always, "It's money, money, money." I don't think there is a cutting edge. I'm not saying it. I'm sure there is, but—.

Cherry: Yes, I don't know of anything that's cutting edge and works. Figure skating, my favorite sport, that's cutting edge. Anyway, I don't know. I often think about people like you, what are you, 30 now, 32?

August: 32.

Cherry: I just hope you're having fun. I have two young women, a couple, and they're making a documentary on me. It might take many more years, but they're working at it. They're in their 30s too. I just love hanging out with them and hearing what interests them now. I get the feeling that—well, I get more than the feeling. I get informed that their generation, they're certainly not having as much fun as they think we are. See, when we were growing up, we could look back to the 1920s and '30s, and people looked like they were having fun then.

Now, I don't know. People look to us. Money, it's true, changes things because it also makes one have to take creative steps that you might not have to take if you just have the money to get somebody to put it together. A lot of the steps that you take, it's like Ed Wood films. A lot of the things you do because you don't have any money, like put a blowup alligator in a kiddie pool and pretend it’s the tropics or something. That makes it very funny. It was all you could afford to do, but it's so honest that it becomes funny.

I guess when you have money—where do these young people get their money? I don't know. Corporate jobs paying that much now? I don't know. I think like you, how you're managing to live in New York City and survive and keep your passion for the LGBTQ project going and yet still keep holding the job and hoping you can meet the rent. Rent was easy for us back then. Wasn't it, Tony?

Tony: We didn't need so much money to survive. We lived in a creative space. There was so much experimentation going on because we could afford to experiment. We could afford to be on the cutting edge and to try this and that and the other things. There's so much pressure now. For a creative endeavor, it has to be successful right away, or that's it, it's over. The record companies in those days, you didn't have to have a hit.

Record companies, like RCA Records had Elvis. He supported the record division. They allowed certain acts. They signed people that were not having hits, and they allowed them to put out one record, two records, three or four records. Now they can't. If you don't have a hit going out of the gate, you're done, that's it. They're not going to give you a second chance.

Cherry: Whatever you do, you have to consider people's attention spans. I don't know how much patience people have, but they seem to be tuning into things like podcasts. They seem to be a big thing now, right? I don't know, time and money must be so hard now.

Tony: Those plays we did cost nothing. If we had $1,000 to do a play, that was a lot. Pork was done for $1,000 at La MaMa. That was a huge budget. We did World with no budget. We all did our own costumes. We did everything ourselves. There was no money behind those plays.

Cherry: MainMan, we got $100 a week plus our rent paid and limousines.

Tony: There was an illusion that MainMan was a really rich company. MainMan didn't have any money. I've been working on a book. I was just writing a piece about—we were in Miami. I was supposed to get a money transfer. Anyway, we did a tour with 34 people. I had $28 in my pocket for 34 people. Leee and I went to the baths and spent the whole $28. Oh, well, we charged everything at the hotel.

Cherry: Yes. Honestly, the only paycheck we ever got was $100 a week.

Tony: The musicians were only making $75.

Cherry: Right. God.

August: Cherry, you went to Hollywood. Can you talk about maybe moving there and your life there?

Cherry: Well, it wasn't an acting career move or anything like that. It was because I was working for Vangelis, the composer of Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner and many albums. He was signed with Sony Classical in New York. He needed a management contact in America for the record company. He just wanted me—I say PR, but doing PR for him was basically turning things down or saying no because people wanted him to do movie after movie. He was very picky.

I opened an office for him in Hollywood. I was already beyond my acting years and all that. I was maybe 50 years old or something. More than 50.

Tony: But she had a very glamorous Hollywood life for quite a while.

Cherry: Yes, I had a whole different kind of life. Because he paid me very well, as far as I'm concerned. I've never been greedy. For me, it was a lot of money, enough to have a good time. I could have lots of dinner parties. I didn't have to ever ask. I could pay my way everywhere.

Tony: It's a gorgeous apartment. Had been Tyrone Power's at one time.

Cherry: Yes, it had 20-foot ceilings and 20-foot windows. It was an apartment with three bedrooms and three and a half bathrooms. Can you imagine? Two floors, right on Hollywood Boulevard. I had an amazing time there because I had the assurance—Vangelis was such a loyal and generous man that I knew, no matter whether he wanted me to fly over to Athens at a moment's notice, which I did many times for him, or go accept an award for him or sign some books or any job he wanted, he knew I would do that for him. I could say no to people because he didn't want to do publicity and he didn't want to do soundtracks.

I had the perfect job. I could devote a lot of time to—I wrote my book while I lived there and worked for him. He let me devote a lot of time to things other than him, as long as he came first. That was a blessing. That's when I met Rufus Wainwright for the first time, Cameron Crowe. I had them over to my apartment for dinner. Malcolm McLaren and his girlfriend stayed with me a few times.

I had another kind of—I had the money to entertain in a beautiful space, and I loved doing it. Like after a Rufus Wainwright concert, for instance, it would get down to the backstage, and that would get down to maybe a party somewhere, a little bar or something. Then it'd be like the hardcore Rufus family left. I loved it when he'd say, "Can we go to your place, Cherry?" I would be thrilled because I always had enough wine and snacks and whatever. I'd have the last of the night. One time, there must have been 100 people. It was like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's. I had a wonderful, wonderful time in Hollywood.

Tony: One time we stayed at the Continental Hyatt House. That's where—yes, you were there at the same time. That's where I met Cameron Crowe. He was 16 years old. He approached me in the coffee shop of the Hyatt House. I was like, "What on Earth does this kid want?" Sometimes those kids were groupies, and they would be willing to have sex with you. I knew the kid wasn't looking for sex. He wanted to come to my room. He just sat in my room for two or three hours watching me on the phone. Then later, years later, when I saw Almost Famous, I realized what he was doing.

Cherry: I didn't get to know him back then, but I remember him being around. We were all like, "Is this kid for real? He's a kid."

Tony: Yes, "It was just another one of those kids." Because Hollywood, when we were on tour with David, was filled—the groupies were kids. They were 12, 13, 14 years old. They would hang out at Rodney Bingenheimer's Club. They would come to the hotel, hang out in the lobby. There were tons of kids around.

Cherry: I didn't get to know him until the late '90s. Then I went to see his play. He did Almost Famous in San Diego as a play.

Tony: Oh, really?

Cherry: Yes. My friend David and I went. We liked it. It's a great subject for a play.

Tony: Well, the movie was great because he did capture a certain thing about that moment in time in that movie, for sure.

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• Tony Zanetta Andy Warhol's Pork Oral History

• Marcus Overseth: San Francisco Free Press, Committee for Homosexual Freedom, Los Angeles Gay Liberation Front Oral History

About The LGBTQ History Project

The LGBTQ History Project is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit preserving the lives and legacies of LGBTQ+ activists from the first wave of gay liberation through oral histories, archives and the QueerCore Podcast.