Multiple Maniacs (John Waters, 1970). Photographs by Lawrence Irvine courtesy and copyright Dreamland Studios.
John Waters still shocks. While the Pope of Trash may now be something of a respectable elder to queer cinema, appearing on talk shows and making annual movie recommendations for Artforum, his films have retained their ability to surprise and challenge the status quo. Works like Mondo Trasho (1969) and Multiple Maniacs (1970) have kept audiences squirming in their seats (and reaching for the barf bags), but they’ve also gained their long-denied critical understanding. They’re now taken seriously, viewed as earnestly as any kind of “respectable” film that doesn’t feature singing anuses, mother-son incest, or rape via giant lobster. Pink Flamingos (1972) is almost certainly the only film in Sight and Sound’s Top 250 greatest films of all-time list that features its lead eating dog feces from the sidewalk.
Yet not every aspect of the Waters canon has been given its rightful due. The actors remain dismissed, viewed as so-bad-they’re-good examples of inept performance or millstones around the narrative’s neck, the latter best demonstrated by The Guardian’s declaration that Waters regular Edith Massey was one of the worst actresses of all-time. The iconic Divine, Waters’s most famous muse, has earned respect more as a cultural landmark than actor. Most cruelly overlooked among the ragtag ensemble known as the Dreamlanders is Nancy Paine Stoll, better known to the world as Mink Stole. Despite having appeared in every single Waters feature to date, her work has received little artistic focus, usually viewed as little more than another semi-professional Waters acquaintance who may or may not know what they’re doing. In reality, Stole isn’t just a great actress: she’s the Barbara Stanwyck of Baltimore filth. If there is a chameleon of sensuality, danger, and camp amid Waters’s actors, it’s Mink.
Stole has been with Waters since the beginning, starring in the short films that preceded his eventual reign as the king of midnight movie madness. Like many of the Dreamlanders, the band of amateurs and Baltimore underground icons who populate Waters’s stories, Stole’s filmography is almost entirely defined by Waters’s work. Untrained and initially uninterested in life in front of the camera, Stole slowly established herself as the most consistently interesting and creatively motivated member of the Waters ensemble. If Divine was the almighty Joan Crawford of filth, a diva of melodrama and woman’s glamorous grit, Stole was akin to a Thelma Ritter or Eve Arden: no less daring but an undeniable scene-stealer with an intense range of femininity on display that both played with and subverted expectations.
Early onscreen appearances of Mink Stole (whose drag-esque stage-name was given to her by Waters as a play on her real surname, Stoll) are a mixture of beguiling and off-putting. In her big-screen debut, Multiple Maniacs, she is introduced sitting in a church, dressed like Norma Desmond with a turban headpiece and painted brows reminiscent of the Photoplay icons of the silent era. She seems like she’d be easily dominated by the Lady Divine, the brash shock mistress and murderer who has been dragged into the church by the Infant Jesus of Prague. Yet it is Stole who takes control, reciting the Stations of the Cross as she quickly seduces Divine and pushes rosary beads up her anus. Her performance is somewhat shaky, as are those of many of her co-stars who are finding their feet in front of the camera, but there’s a command that’s evident from the get-go. When Mink Stole seduces, you acquiesce.
In Pink Flamingos, it is Stole’s fiery-haired Connie Marble who poses the biggest threat to Divine’s battle to be the filthiest person alive. Connie is a human trafficker running a baby ring from her basement who positions her contemptible cruelty as the ambitions of upward social mobility—classy filth. Each line is delivered with the haughtiness of the head of the PTA, a self-appointed bully whose unholier-than-thou declarations are undercut with a kind of malice that makes the subtext of those familiar suburban bullies pure text. If Waters views subtlety as the coward’s way out, Stole makes Connie the most vocal spokesperson for such a philosophy. Dressed to the nines in primary colors with ornate horn-rimmed glasses, Connie has nary a nice word to say about anyone, and she dominates almost everyone who dares near her. Where Divine makes filth seem like the right of the common folk, Stole smears it with a smarm that feels strangely gauche. You want the weirdos to win. Just not that weirdo.
Pink Flamingos (John Waters, 1972).
Waters’s follow-up, Female Trouble (1974), is another showcase for the fabulous Divine, a satire of “teen girls gone bad” stories from the '50s with a healthy dollop of fame-hungry zealotry. Stole plays Divine’s teenage daughter Taffy (she was 27 when the film was released), who spends most of her time onscreen dressed like a drag version of Shirley Temple. It’s one of the great performances of an obviously too-old adult playing a child, the progenitor of Martin Short’s Clifford. She stomps and pouts and shames her mother as she is harshly abused by her. As much as it’s a parody of Bad Seed-esque demon kids, there’s a weird humanity to Taffy, a strain of the pitifully real that permeates Stole’s work, even as its most giddily shrill. Wouldn’t you turn into an adolescent gorgon if you were stuck in a John Waters movie?
Perhaps Stole’s zenith in this regard is her performance in Desperate Living (1977), a rare instance of her being the undisputed lead of a Waters project (and the sole Waters film made during Divine’s lifetime that didn’t feature them.) The dark comedy is often overlooked even by Waters aficionados because of this absence, and the director himself has less-than-positive feelings about the film. Its fractured chaos and bleak cultural prescience, however, provide the perfect backdrop for Stole to shine. Her character, Peggy Gravel, is high-strung to the point of absurdity, a model of middle-class boomer fragility whose mental state evokes the hysteria of Victorian penny dreadfuls. After some kids accidentally break her window with a baseball, a move she characterizes as "an assassination attempt," she dives into a hilariously overlong monologue about law and order where she's the ultimate victim (“I hate the Supreme Court!”)
Stole tears it up, offering a display of pure sobbing fury that is clearly ridiculous yet rooted in the familiar. Nowadays, Peggy would be called the ultimate Karen (and Stole's later roles remained in that mold, the uptight WASPs of Serial Mom [1994] and A Dirty Shame [2004] who view any kind of disruption as a personal vendetta against them). After murdering her husband, Peggy ends up in Mortville, a shanty town where the outcasts of society live under the tyrannical rule of Queen Carlotta (Edith Massey). Peggy is disgusted by this system, but only because she’s not at the top of the pile, and soon she evolves into a fascistic despot who is part Richard Nixon, part Anita Bryant, and part Maleficent. Stole screams that “only the rich should be allowed to live,” her cadence that of a “family values” politician who’s decided to finally drop their last veneer of respectability. It’s through Stole’s furor that Desperate Living’s bleak message comes through: many people don’t want change; they just want to be the one giving the marching orders to others.
Stole has appeared in non-Waters films, such as But I’m a Cheerleader (1999) and the surprisingly long-running gay sex comedy franchise Eating Out (2004-2011), but she is a Dreamlander to the bone. Her work is one of the most enduring parts of the Waters canon, the bump in the road that gives the willing viewer footing between over-the-top and down-to-earth. Waters is reportedly working on his first feature film in 16 years, an adaptation of his own novel Liarmouth. If Mink Stole isn’t among its cast, the Dreamlanders riot at dawn. Trash cinema’s grand dame deserves her close-up.