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Nothing Personal
Insidery on the inside
The stupid party games people play ... in D.C. Plus: Jared Harris on getting dogs stoned -- "It was a gift to the animal." And: Miss America trades her tiara for hot pastrami on rye.
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[12/03/99]

People Feature
'Tis one reason to be jolly
The strippers who came in from the cold: A heartwarming tale of Christmas.
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[12/03/99]

Nothing Personal
Fine celebrity whines
Demi balks, Posh pouts, Arnold throws a hissy fit ... because celebrity is everyone having to say they're sorry.
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[12/02/99]

People Feature
Master of the universe
With the existence of six new planets announced just this week, Geoffrey Marcy is racking up "extrasolar" discoveries like Mark McGwire racks up homers.
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[12/02/99]

Nothing Personal
When toilet seats attack
When you get caught between the seat and New York City, you know it's painful, so you sue. Plus: All aboard Affleck!
By Amy Reiter
[12/01/99]

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The death of Quentin Crisp represents the end not just of a life but of a lifestyle -- the subject he claimed as his area of expertise. He titled one of his books "How to Have a Lifestyle"; his one-man show, "An Evening with Quentin Crisp," which was to have opened in Manchester on Nov. 22, was essentially one long lecture on that heady topic. For Crisp, "having a lifestyle" meant living a stylized life. There was artifice in his every gesture and utterance; his entire existence was a performance. He was the late 20th century embodiment of a turn-of-the-century archetype: the bohemian flâneur, the arty, outrageously dressed stroller of the boulevards who negotiates a hostile world, surviving on his guile and witticisms.

At the root of Crisp's act was a kind of radicalism: Mocked and brutalized for his flamboyant effeminacy, he nonetheless chose to live, beginning in the London of the 1930s, "not merely as a self-confessed homosexual, but a self-evident one." He tinted his hair lilac, wore eye shadow, pert scarves and silk blouses, and transformed himself into a walking, quipping objet d'art. It was this feat of defiant self-invention that eventually brought him celebrity. He wrote several wonderful books and at least one famous one, his 1968 memoir "The Naked Civil Servant." But Quentin Crisp's masterpiece was, emphatically, "Quentin Crisp."

He was born Dennis Pratt in Sutton, a South London suburb, on Christmas Day, 1908. He described his childhood as "uneventful" and his family as "middle-class, middle-brow, middling." He attended a prep school in Derbyshire, where his classmates tormented him for his dainty ways: He was frequently beaten up, an experience that steeled him for the even more brutal treatment he would receive as an adult at the hands of London street toughs.

Crisp was 21 when he quit the suburbs for London, embarking on an existence of "almost unprecedented obscurity" and "lack of accomplishment." In truth, there was nothing obscure about him -- his sensational appearance caused a stir wherever he went -- and the doggedness with which he stayed true to himself, in the face of scorn that frequently turned violent, was no small achievement. Crisp's "professional" life was a mess. He bounced between clerical jobs, worked as a book illustrator, tried his hand at freelance writing. His brief stint as a male prostitute was a failure: Crisp was simply too ostentatiously gay for a clientele that required discretion.

Crisp's real calling was personal amplification, and he carried this odd job off with gusto -- swanning around Soho, speaking his skewed beatitudes, refining his peculiar philosophy of lifestyle. One of its central tenets enshrined domestic slovenliness: Crisp maintained that after four years without being cleaned, a room could get no dirtier, and he prided himself on the absolute squalor of his single-room homes -- the Chelsea bedsit where he lived for 40 years, and the studio near the Bowery that was for 18 years his New York home.

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