TONY ZANETTA
- LGBTQHP
- 1 hour ago
- 8 min read
PERFORMER
I met Tony Zanetta through Cherry Vanilla, whom I interviewed several years ago when I was a teenager. Cherry and Tony acted in plays together and went on to work at David Bowie’s management company, MainMan, during his glam and rock phase, immersing themselves in a world of groundbreaking music, fashion, and theatrical experimentation. Their early careers placed them at the heart of a transformative cultural moment that blended performance, persona, and pop stardom.
Tony is best known for his role as Andy Warhol in the play 1971 Pork. The play captured the wild energy and outrageous personalities of Warhol’s world, featuring recorded conversations with Warhol superstars. Tony’s performance brought Pork chaotic, larger-than-life characters vividly to life, leaving a lasting impression on audiences and critics alike.
In this interview, Tony reflects on stepping into Warhol’s shoes, the intensity of the Off Broadway scene, and the unforgettable creative chaos that shaped Pork. He offers a rare glimpse into a world where art, fame, and excess collided, sharing insights about the collaborators, inspirations, and risks that defined that vibrant moment in theater history.
— August Bernadicou, Executive Director of The LGBTQ History Project
“I had a nice childhood in terms of being gay. I remember grade school—it was never a problem, but I would always be on the girls' side, not the boys' side. There was a big snowball fight between the girls and the boys, and I was on the girls' side, but I don't remember being totally ostracized because of that. The first thing about being gay that I remember was in junior high, and I must have been in seventh grade—these Black boys were in my English class, and they called me a ‘fairy.’ I didn't know what a fairy was, so that made me self-conscious about the way I spoke and the way I held my hands. I soon started smoking, and that made me self-conscious about the way I held my cigarette. I held a cigarette like a girl. I was certainly a gay kid. I was very different, quote, unquote, whatever that means. But it didn't bother me. My father would say, ‘Oh, you should have been—he should have been born a girl, not a boy.’
I grew up in Jamestown, New York, and had a friend named Jane. She started teaching in Jamestown, and one night, Jane was in the Buccaneer Lounge, a gay bar, when a guy came in. He had nothing to do with the Mafia or anything like that. He just came in to rob the place, and he shot and killed the bartender. It wasn't, as far as I know, an anti gay attack because the bartender wasn't gay. Jane, because she was in that bar, lost her teaching job because she was associating with undesirables. So that was the climate.
It’s funny, because, in those days, everybody was young and everybody was good-looking, and blah, blah, blah, and we didn't see beyond 30. 30 was the cut-off. It didn't seem like there were any gay people over 30. I'm sure there were. In our brains, it was like, it was almost like being gay, you were going to have a short life, maybe you would meet someone, settle down, whatever, but the whole thing about being gay was being very young and going to the bars and carrying on.
I basically moved to New York City to be gay. I had no ambition. I had no meaning. There were certainly things that I wanted to do, but I shoved everything aside to be gay. Gay became my main identity. And my idea was we'll all come to New York and meet a boyfriend. I think that's what I wanted to do. I did do that, actually. I was pretty liberated before Stonewall. In New York, there were not a lot of gay bars because there had been a big crackdown. The main bar was Julius’, and then the Stonewall opened up. There were other bars in the Village whose names I have forgotten. Julius' was very—everybody there was very, very preppy. You went into Julius’, and it was jam-packed with young people. You could barely move. I'm sure you've been to Julius'. If you went in that front door, it would probably take an hour to get to the back door or to get to the bathroom, because it was so jam-packed with people.
I started doing theater in 1969. I started working with the director, Tony Ingrassia. The first play I did was World: Birth of a Nation by Jayne County. Through the play, I met Jayne County, Leee Black Childers, Cherry Vanilla, and Jamie Andrews. I met all these people with whom I would become very close for the next few years.
Jayne was practically a biblical scholar, and that was her main motivation as a youngster. Then she kind of strayed from that path when she discovered the 60s in the British Invasion groups and rock and roll and her gay self and drag. Her world opened up.
The most famous play I was in was called Pork. I played Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol gave a tape-recorded conversation with Warhol Superstars to Tony Ingrassia to write a play about. There's all this confusion over exactly what the process was. First of all, at that time, a portable tape recorder was a new thing, and everybody had one. They were cheap, maybe 30 bucks to get this little tape recorder. There was an attachment that you put on your phone. So it was very—everybody was taping every phone conversation that they had.
The tapes were primarily with Brigid Berlin, who also went by Brigid Polk and grew up the child of New York socialites. Brigid and Warhol would tape each other's conversations, but he would tape all kinds of conversations. Brigid did a one-person show at the Bouwerie Lane Theatre called Brigid Polk Strikes! And in that production—I'm not exactly sure what it entailed, but I think she played some phone conversations, and she also—from the stage, she called people on the phone. One of the people she called was Huntington Hartford, a very wealthy art collector. She told Huntington Hartford that she was pregnant and needed an abortion, and asked if he would lend her the money. He said he would. She left the stage and went to Huntington Hartford's apartment Uptown, got the money, and then came back and finished the performance. In some ways, Brigid Berlin was a very, very interesting artist, and she and Andy were very close friends. A lot of what he did, she had done first, like Polaroids. That was all Brigid Berlin. Later, Andy did the Polaroids and the tapes.
You couldn't tell which tape was Andy's and which was Brigid's. So, he then gives the transcriptions of the tapes to Ingrassia to put together in some kind of order to create this play. Now, some people say that he had actually been working on this idea for quite a while, and that he originally wanted to do this as, like an epic, I don't know, not 24 hours, but a very long thing where you would go, where the actor, where the audience, would move from room to room, and these different scenes would be in different rooms, which I think is great. It is kind of like what they do now with the McKittrick Hotel.
Ira Gale came to see Pork, loved it, and wanted to bring it to England. Ingrassia and Andy had dreams of Broadway. The play could have been very successful if it had stayed in New York and either been done in an alternative space or an Off Broadway theater. I don't think it was ever going to be a big thing on Broadway, but they thought maybe it would. Nobody was stepping forth to produce this play in New York, but they wanted to bring it to London. And they felt it was important to Ingrassia, especially, to keep the play alive, with the hopes of either transferring it then to the West End in London or bringing it back to New York. They really believed that it could be on Broadway. They wanted to keep the play alive, so they were receptive to Ira and then brought it to London.
The play was a sensation, for sure. It was only six weeks, but we did pretty good business. We got really good reviews to really bad reviews. They didn't quite know what to make of it, but it was certainly something that got noticed. Everybody who was anybody came to see Pork. So we were like stars that summer.
During the run of the play in New York, I had this Rolling Stone magazine that I used as a prop that I sat reading while on stage. In it, there was a big article about Andy Warhol’s Factory and Andy. There was a little, teeny blurb in that same issue about this guy, this English guy who wore—who was a musician, who wore dresses, and that was David Bowie. We all thought, ‘Oh, that's interesting. He wears dresses.’ He was also married, which made it even more interesting. So when we were in London, Cherry, who played Brigid in the play—she was already a big groupie. That was her main identity. She was a groupie, groupie, groupie. She wanted to see all the bands and sleep with all the bands. To get tickets to all these concerts, she said that she was writing a column for Cream magazine, called Cherry Vanilla with Scoops for You. So she would contact the PR offices at the record companies and get tickets for her and Leee to see these bands. Leee photographed them. They would go to shows together.
Then they saw that David Bowie was playing at this little place called the Country Club. So Cherry, Leee, and Jayne went to see David Bowie at the Country Club. He was a folk musician, and it wasn't what they expected. It was like—although Mick Ronson was there, and I think there was another musician, but it was folky, and he wasn't wearing a dress, and he wasn't that particularly interesting looking. He was more impressed by them and introduced them as being the Warhol stars, and then they invited him to see the play. So he and Angie, his wife and his manager, came to see Pork,
Before I became president of MainMan, Bowie’s management company during his Ziggy Stardust phase, I began doing small errands for him. That’s how I got involved with him and in the creation of MainMan. I was paid $100 a week, and that covered rent. We were like Off Off Broadway people. We were used to doing things for no money. We were used to doing things out of love for things and out of passion for things. We were willing to work twenty-four seven—this was not a nine-to-five job for any of us. Cherry, who started as a receptionist, proposed that she should be the PR person. She had never done publicity, but she was going to be the PR person. So the first thing she did was create her PR list, which was 5000 people, which I think we might have been a little excessive, but she did—they were all categorized by different people who were in the music business, who were in the ad agency, who was this, who was that. We started creating newsletters, which PR professionals didn't typically do. So we would send out these newsletters that she would write, announcing our every move and sending pictures. Half of these people were not even part of the music business, but we spread awareness about David Bowie very quickly.”