New Era of Notoriety for Artist ‘King Gimp’

At Dan Keplinger’s first solo exhibition, at the Phyllis Kind Gallery in SoHo, there occurred an event that was at first alarming and then familiar: Keplinger fell out of his wheelchair and lay on the floor, twitching uncontrollably. Viewers of this year’s Oscar ceremonies saw him do this when the film about his life, “King Gimp,” won best documentary short. Here at the gallery, he had just sold his first painting.

“We should have bought one early on,” says the film’s producer, Susan Hadary. “Who knew?”

“I don’t even have one,” says Keplinger’s mother, Linda, mock-indignantly.

Keplinger, whose paintings now command $5,000, has cerebral palsy. His movements are involuntary--he can’t control his limbs or facial muscles, meaning he can’t walk or hold a fork or make himself understood (unless you’ve spent a lot of time with him), and his ungovernable impulses are exacerbated when he gets excited.

“King Gimp,” which will be seen Monday on HBO, chronicles how he overcame these obstacles, to the point where he lives on his own and may even have a career as a painter.

In many ways what is more remarkable than what Keplinger has accomplished--it perhaps explains what he’s accomplished--is his attitude. Though what he says has to be painstakingly translated word by word--by his mother, his friends, the filmmakers--it’s clear that Keplinger is engaged, impish and not nearly as consumed by anger, self-pity or a sense of entitlement as most of us would be. He doesn’t expect anything from anybody--except a chance, which, as the film makes clear, is a lot to ask. It’s pretty obvious where his attitude comes from.

“Even at 27, he still does amazing things,” Linda says, “so how could I ever put any limitations on him when he was 7 or 10 or think by the time he was 20 he wouldn’t be able to do anything on his own and he’ll be too big for me to handle? Why would I think that far ahead when every day he amazes me, his mother?”

She resisted pressure to institutionalize Dan, enrolling him instead in a school for the disabled and then, when he was bored with that, “mainstreaming” him into public school and eventually college, at Maryland’s Towson State University, where he graduated with a degree in art. Divorced, she worked nights so that she could take care of him, his younger brother, and later his twin half-brother and -sister during the day. (When asked when she slept, she says she didn’t.) According to one of Dan’s teachers, Linda has a terrier-like quality about getting what she wants for him without putting people off. Clearly, he’s inherited some of this too.

“King Gimp,” which was edited to 39 minutes for Oscar consideration (49 minutes for airing), squeezes in 13 years of Keplinger’s life, starting when he was 12. The filmmakers, Hadary and William Whiteford, originally were shooting footage of children with disabilities. But they found Keplinger’s story so compelling that they continued to follow him, eventually winding up with around 100 hours of material. They then had him come in over the course of two summers and view the footage so that he could write a narrative, pecking out the words, letter by letter, with a pencil attached to his head. He eventually came up with 80 pages that moved, shocked and surprised them. In fact, some of what Keplinger had to say was so honest--for example, about his sexual frustration--that Hadary says she wanted to sanitize the narrative a bit, protect him from himself, but her old partner, Bill, and new partner, HBO, which had stepped in with money and editorial advice (including the suggestion that Keplinger’s words should be subtitled or spoken by him rather than a narrator), said no, that’s who he is.

It turns out that who Keplinger is is a lot more interesting than some glossy Hollywood production might have him be--although he does resemble Christie Brown, the flawed real-life hero of “My Left Foot” (a movie he likes), who also had cerebral palsy. Keplinger is obviously venturesome (he’s shown on film skiing), stubborn (he refuses medication and artificial supports) and independent (he rides his wheelchair 40 minutes to watch his siblings play softball).

He also likes to drink, learning to open beer bottles on concrete walls and wine bottles with a screwdriver. He makes no bones about his feelings for women, including Laura Moore, who was brought in to tutor him and who remembers him doing doughnuts in his wheelchair on a neighbor’s lawn to impress a friend of hers. At the Vanity Fair party following the Oscars he partied with a largely female entourage and nuzzled with Gwyneth Paltrow and Salma Hayek.

The Story Startled Some Who Knew Him

Keplinger has a black sense of humor too. He and his brother, Paul, a tattoo artist, collaborated on the design of a tattoo for him but couldn’t figure out a way to keep him still long enough to apply it, short of anesthetizing him (the tattoo consisted of the wheelchair image taken from a driver’s license with a crown added overhead, a reference to his nickname, King Gimp, itself a joke).

The Dan Keplinger stories fall like rain. But it’s not all high spirits and jokes, of course. The movie makes clear how hard things have been, in ways that startled even the people who know and love him.

“For 27 years, Dan and I have been busy fighting, putting things into play, getting things accomplished,” Linda says. “We didn’t take a lot of time to sit down--we didn’t have heartfelt discussions. When I saw the film, it threw me into a tailspin. I went through a two-week depression, because I remember holding him as an infant in the rocking chair and speaking these words to him: ‘I don’t want you to grow up, I don’t want you to feel the pain you’re going to feel, the unacceptance, the absence of love.’ I’ve never spoken those words to him in all that time from infancy to the present. And then when I saw him in the film and he was speaking the same words that I felt in my heart at that time, that’s what touched me.”

Keplinger speaks most clearly, of course, through his painting, which he does with his head--the brush is attached to a device strapped around it, unicorn-like. If he needs to change brushes, someone has to do that for him. Obviously he can’t sketch out what he wants to do. He just does it. The effort is extraordinary, which may in part account for the paintings’ power. Many of them are expressionistic self-portraits that convey his frustration with his condition. It also accounts for the resistance some people might have to his work. After all, it’s easy to imagine that he received a SoHo exhibition because of who he is, not the art itself. He’s not unaware of this.

“I have had some issues with doing shows with the disabled, because I didn’t want to be labeled as a disabled artist,” he says.

But Phyllis Kind, a well-known New York gallery owner who has been representing artists for 32 years and who had the same concerns when HBO first approached her about mounting the show, insists that he’s the real thing. He ended up selling seven of the 30 paintings he had on display on opening night, including the one that put him on the floor. It turned out to be his favorite, so his pleasure was mixed with the pain of seeing it go.

Says an old teacher of his, “He’ll just have to get used to it.”

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* “King Gimp” can be seen Monday at 7 p.m. on HBO.