STILL WATERS : The Auteur of the Bizarre Is Making Hollywood Movies, but His Heart Remains in White-Trash Balimore

ONCE, WE SAW someone get his nose bit off here.”

John Waters offers this memory as if it were an unimpeachable reason to love The Club Charles, where he is now sitting.

The Charles is Waters’ favorite bar in Baltimore, his hometown and the setting for his peculiar contributions to American film making. The place features a giant finger that hangs from the ceiling and points toward the entrance, as if to urge patrons back onto the street. It’s a Tuesday night and the club is nearly deserted, though the weekend crowd, Waters claims, is the “most mixed ever--blacks, whites, young, old, transvestites.” Of course, the club was even better in its former incarnation as the Wigwam.

“It was the scariest bar in the entire country, full of drunken hillbillies,” recalls Patricia Moran in a complimentary tone. Moran, Waters’ sidekick of 25 years, is instinctively slumped against him.

Vestiges of Wigwam wildness must still be floating through the air. For the past 20 minutes, a hulking man in a baseball cap has been dementedly glaring at Waters and Moran from his bar stool nearby. Waters strikes a pose of calculated disinterest that is worthy of Ronald Colman. Gracefully he tucks his palms into the pockets of his finely tailored black jacket, crosses one chartreuse corduroy trouser leg over the other and looks away.

At 43, Waters still enjoys such minuscule brushes with danger. In fact, this fascination is what the John Waters celluloid world of cross-dressers, former B-girls and various hard cases is about. This, after all, is the man who transformed his corpulent childhood neighbor, Harris Glenn Milstead, into Divine, a 300-pound drag queen who in Waters’ “Pink Flamingos” competed with baby sellers for the title of Filthiest Person Alive--and won.

From the very beginning, Waters gravitated to “people who were everything my parents were against.” Even in high school, he’d drag home only the most alarming reprobates, hoping to send his vehemently middle-class family into a tizzy. Take “the girl who had a beehive hairdo and no teeth,” he says. “My mother wept.”

The baseball-capped man finally slides off his perch and appears poised to leap right on top of them. Abruptly he exits. “Once, we saw someone’s nose get bit off,” Waters says, his dark gray eyes following the would-be assailant.

How horrible.

“Why?” shrugs Moran. “Wasn’t our noses.”

“It got sewed right back on,” Waters adds in a Baltimore drawl. He flashes an ambiguous smile, one that seems both wry and soothing. “Besides, he wasn’t Montgomery Clift to start off with.”

THIS LIGHTER SIDE of far-fetched mayhem perhaps best defined the naughty thrill behind what Waters calls his “early atrocities.” What midnight movie fans came to expect was all-around offensiveness: chicken decapitations and whiny soliloquies, unfolding with what was assumed to be spontaneity. But, actually, Waters was a by-the-book director--every perversion was carefully detailed in his talky scripts, no ad-libbing allowed. These cheapie shock flicks had a style all their own--the scratchy, garish cinematography was intentional (though, because of Waters’ anorexic bank account, also unavoidable). For the uninitiated, the story line of the magnificently dented “Female Trouble” (1974) tells it all: Dawn Davenport, an explosively temperamental teen-ager (played by Divine), runs away from home, hitchhikes her way into the arms of a slobby no-account named Earl Peterson (also played by Divine) who impregnates and then abandons her to a life of prostitution. Playing out the sorry hand fate has dealt her, Dawn’s rapidly loosening hold on reality leads her to commit mass homicide--as the climax of her trampoline nightclub act, she blows away the audience. The grand finale? Our heroine jerking delightedly as she fries in the electric chair.

In “Multiple Maniacs” (1970), “Pink Flamingos” (1972) and “Desperate Living” (1977), Waters continued to refine his comic flair for no-apologies filth. It wasn’t until “Polyester” (1981), a romantic melodrama starring Divine and ‘50s teen idol Tab Hunter, that Waters made a film that “didn’t try to scare anyone.” But when 1988’s “Hairspray,” a teen-dance sendup, became a commercial hit, it signaled more than the fact that Waters’ overactive imagination had begun spewing forth PG images. Financed for $2.6 million by New Line Cinema, the independent production company that distributed all of Waters’ films, “Hairspray” took in $7 million in theatrical distribution and continues to make money on tape rentals.

“John Waters is money in the bank,” says Sara Risher, president of production at New Line. “But I’m still not convinced that a typical Hollywood mentality will ever understand a John Waters point of view or how to sell it.” Executives at Universal Studios apparently disagree. The studio paid Waters a reported $1 million for his current release, “Cry-Baby,” an Elvis Presley-like musical about an adolescent tough and the pristine, upper-class girl he loves. With a $10-million budget, Waters bought himself this luxuriously strange dream cast: Johnny Depp, Patty Hearst, Polly Bergen, Troy Donahue, David Nelson and Traci Lords.

Since the success of “Hairspray,” Waters has received the adulation usually reserved for cultural icons. He has become a frequent guest on “Late Night With David Letterman.” A collection of his original scripts has been placed in the cinema archives at Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, alongside those of directors Elia Kazan and Frank Capra. “Maybe today he seems like an outsider, but 30 years from now, he’ll seem like the only person who fit in,” says Jeanine Basinger, a professor of American studies at Wesleyan. “He understands that the art of our times is our trash.”

AN EMPTY DUNKIN’ Donuts coffee cup and a crumpled box of Juicy Fruit lay on the floor of Waters’ midnight-blue Chrysler Le Baron. Always, this is how he drives: left foot wedged underneath right knee, radio dial anchored on an oldies station. When “Town Without Pity” comes on, he cranks it up. “That’s the anthem of Baltimore,” he says. Because all of Waters’ 11 films have been shot in his revered home town, it seems that every building evokes some cinematic or personal recollection.

On Lombard Street is the mustard-hued University of Maryland, where Waters mounted the “world premiere” of his most notorious film, “Pink Flamingos.” “The poodle came on a jeweled leash,” he excitedly recalls. “ Love isn’t exactly the word for how it was received. Let’s just say I could tell it worked.”

Some landmarks need only the briefest description. Waters gestures toward a grim-looking complex surrounded by coils of razor-wire. “The Maryland Penitentiary,” he says in an ominous voice. “The Big House. The Joint. The Big Bird Cage.”

Soon he aims his Chrysler down the narrow avenue called The Block, Baltimore’s burlesque district. “When Divine and I were 15 or something we used to hook school to see Libby Jones, Irma the Body and Zorro.” Waters gets out and tugs at the door of Blaze Starr’s Two O’Clock club. Locked.

“I love strippers,” he says dreamily. This is an understatement. To hear Waters hold forth on exotic dancers is to gain insight into the genesis of an aesthetic principle. “I like the ones who love it, who don’t think it’s one bit weird. Like, ‘Whaddya mean? I’m in show business!’ ” says Waters, in a Gypsy Rose Lee honk. “There’s a tawdriness that’s glamour in reverse. Like, as long as they believe it, it’s true.”

Later, Waters is gulping down shellfish at the Lexington Market. “Oh, look it,” he whispers admiringly. Waters is staring at a middle-aged woman in a white damask dress and bubble hairdo, her head tilting flirtatiously at a chubby businessman puffing a five-inch cigar. “Them, I could think up a whole story about,” he says. “She’s an ex-hooker and . . . “

This habit of conjuring up scenarios about strangers is testimony to Waters’ fascination with the human condition. “John’s always been interested in the mechanics of peoples’ lives, figuring out what makes them do stuff,” says Mink Stole, one of his longtime starlets. And his curiosity displays itself in his infatuation with the most sensationalistic criminal cases. Not only does he see them as good bad theater, Waters loves all the personal minutiae that is revealed in the name of jurisprudence. He has sat in on some of the most notorious trials in recent memory, from those of the Manson family to that of serial killer Richard Ramirez. He reads--voraciously--every overripe true-crime book, devours every newspaper account.

While attending the McMartin Preschool pre-trial in 1984, he spotted some of the defendants meekly eating their lunches in the cafeteria. “Nobody would get near their table,” he says. Waters raises his two pointer fingers and makes the hex sign. “So, I just took my tray and sat down with them.” He asked his luncheon companions: “If you’re not guilty, why aren’t you furious?”

“The best defendant to watch,” wrote Waters in his first book, “Shock Value,” “is one who is guilty and unrepentant but who denies his guilt.” Over the years, his tastes have changed: “What interests me now is what happens when someone is guilty and then they get better. How do they deal with what they have done?”

This shift in focus owes much to Waters’ explorations beyond the courtroom. (A hilarious chapter in his second book, “Crackpot,” describes his stint teaching film at Patuxent Institution, a maximum-security facility outside Baltimore.) Perhaps the relationships he has built with a number of convicted murderers have blunted the exhilaration, their ghoulish deeds revealed, finally, as real-life tragedy.

One of the causes to which Waters lends his name is Friends of Leslie, a group that urges parole for Manson family member Leslie Van Houten. “This is one of the few subjects that I hope you don’t use for its shock value,” Waters requests. “Like, ‘Hey! He knows a Manson girl!’ I have visited Leslie for many years, and I think she should get out. The public still thinks of that bald-headed girl from 21 years ago. I know I was very different 21 years ago than I am now. Leslie is not a girl. She’s a 40-year-old woman who looks back on what she did with,” Waters pauses for the right word “ . . . with horror. If you believe in rehabilitation, if you believe that there is such a thing as that, then Leslie is totally rehabilitated.”

OVER THE FIREPLACE at his parents’ two-story red-brick house is a pastel portrait of John Waters at 6 years old, with round and wetly sad-looking eyes. “John doesn’t like it; I do,” smiles Patricia Waters, his mother. She clasps her hands, then unclasps them, and self-consciously pats her Barbara Bush-white hair. Reporters make her nervous; they want to rehash times she’d rather not remember. “John’s a very good singer and dancer,” she announces at one point. “He taught me how to do the cha-cha. But he says he’s not a good dancer and he won’t do anything in public that he doesn’t shine at.” Then, she adds hurriedly, “Um, you’d better get John to OK that.”

Her hesitation dissipates only when she speaks about her five grandchildren or shows off her collection of English coronation ware or points out the impressive estate in nearby Guilford where she grew up. She walks through her spotless home, revealing polished hardwood floors, well-appointed mahogany antiques and beautiful Oriental rugs. This is her chance to set the record straight: John Waters came from a good home.

On the walls, there are several framed photographs of a china-blue Victorian, the house in Lutherville where John was reared. The way both mother and son tell the story, this was where Waters’ film career was born: In 1964, after Waters’ grandmother presented him with an 8-millimeter Brownie movie camera, he made “Hag in a Black Leather Jacket.” The 17-minute short, filmed on the roof of the house, was about an interracial romance.

“He was trying to shock the world,” his mother sighs. “He was trying to shock me, too.” She skips the dinner table rages over the length of her son’s oily hair, the couple’s conservative politics (as a frame of reference, consider that Waters’ uncle was John Whitaker, former Undersecretary of the Interior in Nixon’s Cabinet). She brushes aside his expulsion from his dormitory at New York University for smoking marijuana.

Says her son: “I can look back on those times and think, ‘Ah, youth.’ My parents can’t. It’s still painful to them.” His mother says: “I never knew what he was so angry about. But at some point in his life he decided that he was against everything we stood for.”

When she can, she makes eye-rolling, jokey references to her confusion about her eldest son’s peculiarities. Unlike his two younger sisters and brother, he adored villainous characters and the staging of hideous wrecks with his toy cars. “He also loved to exaggerate,” she says. After the first week at public junior high school, he told his mother, “As long as you don’t stab the teacher with a nail file or a knife, they pass you.”

“I’m sure he was making a lot of it up. But it makes a mother and father like this”--she stretches out her hands and makes them tremble.

She was relieved to find “Hairspray” a “very kind, sweet movie.” But neither she nor her husband, John Waters Sr., has seen “Pink Flamingos,” and they don’t intend to. “It would be upsetting,” she says, stiffening. “We can’t understand why anybody would want to put those gross ideas on the screen.” Yet, she clearly savors the irony that for others, her son’s fame has somehow sanitized those astonishing images.

“There were people who used to ask, ‘How’s Kathy? How’s Stephen? How’s Trish?’ And not even ask about John. Now they say, ‘Oh, you must so be proud of him!’ And I laugh. What was in that can 10 years ago hasn’t changed,” says Patricia, referring to her son’s early films.

Growing older has allowed her and Waters the delicately constructed friendship of mothers and adult sons. Theirs is a truce in which personal tastes are graciously indulged and mutual respect is expressed in exchanging advice. John and Patricia Waters are planning to fly to England together. “He asked me to show him a few things,” she says, clapping her hands together. “I think he’d like the Tower of London. He’d like to know where everybody got beheaded.”

ON A QUIET,tree-lined street in north Baltimore, around the corner from the elementary school he once attended, is the four-story home that John Waters purchased a year and a half ago. Much has been made of his grotesque decorating touches--the vintage submachine gun on the floor of an anteroom, the electric chair from “Female Trouble” in the hallway, the bad oil painting by mass murderer John Wayne Gacy in the guest room.

But this is far more surprising: The Oriental rugs, the abundance of vases stuffed with fresh-cut daffodils and tulips, the tasteful antiques. It duplicates, if anything, the bright, comfortable elegance of his parents’ house.

Talk of his “maturity” seems to rankle him, if only for the fact that there are few similarities between his own lifestyle and that of his characters. Waters, in fact, sticks to a rather wholesome schedule: He’s up every morning by 7 and writes for at least four hours every day. No socializing on weeknights. “There’s this conception that his films were really documentaries,” says Mink Stole. “But I’ve never even seen him out of control.” For years Waters smoked three and a half packs of cigarettes a day; his Kool Lights were as much his trademark as that skinny mustache he shamelessly highlights with eyebrow pencil. But six months ago, he decided to quit when his brother, Stephen, was hospitalized with a brain tumor. “He’s fine now,” says Waters. “But it scared the hell out of me.

“I came the closest ever to a nervous breakdown trying to quit,” he says. It doesn’t show. His sharp angularity is gone; those 10 extra pounds he gained have given him an old-Hollywood elegance. Waters--who once noted sourly that jogging was OK only if someone was chasing you--now engages in a clandestine daily sit-up regimen. Some of his friends say he has never looked more dashing. “Plus,” says Pat Moran, “his skin isn’t green anymore.”

There are close friends whom he misses, ones who aren’t around to share the good times. Edith Massey, a centerpiece of the Waters ensemble, died of cancer in 1984. Cookie Mueller, the fierce ingenue from his earli est films, succumbed recently to AIDS. Two years ago, Divine died in his sleep, just days after the bandwagon “Hairspray” reviews began pouring in.

The events following Divine’s death are blurred in Waters’ memory. He just went through the motions: giving the press a statement, attending to the burial. It was, he says, like being in “an off-Broadway play, ‘The Night Divine Died,’ ” the highlights of which included a funeral that was both extravagant and odd. The neighborhood Waters and Divine grew up in was brought to a standstill by the enormous procession of mourners. The makers of “Married With Children,” the sitcom that Divine was to have taped a segment of the following day, sent flowers with a card that read: “Why didn’t you just tell us you didn’t want to do it?”

But when silence replaced the uproar, Waters found himself angered over this saddest of endings. “It was like, God, how unfair,” he says in a tight voice. “Divine really struggled all those years and never got much of a chance to enjoy it. He was too young to die. Divine would have been a great old man.”

WATERS IS CIRCLING Fell’s Point, a dockside shopping district still pleasantly seamy enough to accommodate raggedy panhandlers and street-corner drunks, looking for someplace to park. “Over there is where Edie’s shop used to be,” he says. Now it’s two doors down and is being run by her old partner. After her mewling performance in “Pink Flamingos,” Massey put her savings into a knickknack store. When Waters was in a bad mood, he “would come down here and she’d always make me laugh, just by saying things that were so off the wall.”

In the past, Waters has been accused of exploiting Massey’s dizziness, Divine’s desperate need for acceptance and Ricki Lake’s plumpness. This year, he will undoubtedly be criticized for making fun of Kim McGuire, a goggle-eyed actress who plays Hatchet Face in “Cry-Baby.”

“All show biz is exploitation. What’s the difference between exploiting Meryl Streep because she’s a good actress and Edie because she’s like no other actress? What I’m saying is that I genuinely believe that being alarming-looking or overweight makes you a star in my movies, and I hope that any time someone is a star in a movie of mine it makes their life better.”

As the size of Waters’ cast of curiosities grows, so does respect for the auteur . The telephone rings constantly with speaking-engagement offers; editors are eager to print his tautly written essays, some of which elaborate on “why he loves” Christmas and The National Enquirer. If he wants, his next screenplay--which isn’t yet written--already has a buyer.

But if Waters’ popularity has anything to do with a certain kindness at the heart of his work, it carries over into more conventional good deeds. The premier of “Cry-Baby,” for example, was a benefit for AIDS Action Baltimore, attended by the whole cast and Waters’ entire family. You have to give Waters credit for consistency, though. This indisputably benevolent gesture comes with its own tilted perspective. “You know what I always tell ‘em?” Waters says. “Give the money to the worst junkies, to the ones that even gay groups hate. They’re the ones who need it the most. Not only are they sick, they’re mean. You know, it’s hard enough to be sick without being bitter, mean and friendless.”

Waters is heading up another block, another long-ago film location. Then his lively monologue (“in ‘Multiple Maniacs,’ this was where the Infant of Prague appears to Divine . . . and over there is where Divine got raped in the alley”) is interrupted. Up ahead, on the grimy sidewalk, are three boys who are startled to be confronted by two strangers.

“Just what are you doing?” Waters asks in the voice of a stern uncle.

“We’re throwin’ rocks on the roof,” the bravest one pipes up.

“Well, then. Aim for the windows,” is Waters’ helpful suggestion.