I got myself together enough to be cast in Sister Aimee, a gospel-infused musical, which debuted off-Broadway at the Gene Frankel Theater. The show told the story of Aimee Semple McPherson’s rise to cult status as the first successful radio evangelist. It was directed by David Holdgrive, with book, music, and lyrics by Worth Gardner. I played Louise Messnick, a young woman stricken with crippling arthritis whom Sister Aimee cures miraculously through the laying-on of hands. The show was warmly received, and I got my first review in the New York Times:
Miss Jennifer Lewis . . . is what is sometimes called a shouter, but the shouting has intelligence and style. Her “Glory Train” is a joy.
People, there is one “n” in my name. Remember that. Anyway, even though John Corry, the Times critic, misspelled Jenifer, I was thrilled. A favorable review in the Times was a huge accomplishment.
Sister Aimee played only on the weekends. While it was running, I started rehearsals for another off-Broadway musical named El Bravo at the Entermedia Theater on 2nd Avenue. El Bravo transplanted the Robin Hood legend to the barrio of East Harlem. It was directed by Patricia Birch, the much-admired choreographer who had been nominated for numerous Tony Awards, including for Grease.
I played two roles: a police officer and a ventriloquist with a dummy named Madge (again I point you to Streisand in Funny Girl: “Can you skate?”).
Although El Bravo was trashed by the critics and ran only forty-eight performances, the show is memorable to me for many reasons. My castmates included Vanessa Bell. She was so pretty and talented and has remained a friend through the years. She later appeared as Eddie Murphy’s arranged bride in Coming to America. I also became close with the lovely and graceful Starr Danais and Olga Merediz, who sang my favorite song in the show, “Funeral, Funeral, Animal.” The music director’s name was Louis St. Louis and I, being Jenifer Lewis from St. Louis, hit it off with him right away.
It was during rehearsals for El Bravo that I met Quitman Fludd. He always used his full name. In noting it I want to honor his grandeur, splendor, and beauty: Quitman Daniel Fludd III. Something happened in rehearsal, and we both laughed. When two people laugh at the same ignorant shit, they are instantly bonded. They want to play together, laugh together, sing together. And boy did we sing! He was a soprano and I was a baritone. He was feminine, I was not (sexy and fabulous, yes, but never a “lady,” as it were).
Quitman was a new kind of person for me. He was an only child and he had been well loved. He had grown up a talented Southern gay black boy in the ’50s. He couldn’t wait to get out of Nashville and become a dance major at Juilliard. He used to recite a poem, “Incident,” by Countee Cullen, to illustrate what it had been like in the Jim Crow South.
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now, I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
At only sixteen, Quitman danced in the original Broadway production of Hello, Dolly! and later in the Broadway production of On the 20th Century. In the mid-’70s, he understudied Ben Vereen in the original version of Pippin.
Quitman was beautiful—tall, fit, perfect teeth, mustache. You could tell he was a dancer: he walked on air, chest out like an ostrich. I had never known anyone who gave himself so many facials, always while wearing a pink shower cap to hold his hair back. Quitman was refined, bourgeois, and elegant. He was always groomed to the T. He was perhaps ten years older than me and was fascinated by my youth, drive, and naiveté. He thought I was the cat’s meow.
We spoke every morning. When I’d pick up the phone and there was no answer to my hello, I knew it was Quitman on the other end of the line. Neither of us would speak. For minutes at a time. Then one of us would crack up. We did this every morning for years. We were innocent! We had a pure relationship and truly knew who the other was.
Let me tell y’all what me and this fool used to do. Sometimes I would show up at his apartment devastated that I didn’t get a part. I would bust in, totally fucked up over one thing or another—usually it was a man or a lost audition. I would sit by his window on the forty-fourth floor of the Manhattan Plaza with the string tied tight on my white hoodie in full makeup and, yes, black mascara running down my face. Gesturing, flailing my hands about, posturing, sobbing, jumping up, pointing out the window, blaming anybody but myself for what had happened.
Quitman would let me go on and on and on. Then he would sweetly say, “Let me get you a tissue,” but instead he would come back with a white towel wrapped around his head, reflecting my white hoodie and my madness to myself. He would then proceed to reenact the entire scene ver-fucking-batim. As I watched him imitating me, this man with a photographic memory and a sense of humor to boot would make me damn near pee myself. After he’d gotten a cold towel for me to wipe that shit off my eyes and blow my nose, he would gently push me out of the door and whisper, “I’ll see you in a month.”
This son-of-a-bitch I loved. Had Quitman not been gay, he is the only man I would have ever actually married.
Within a couple of months of our becoming friends, Quitman started writing my first one-woman show. He wrote lyrics that were so true and spoke to our lives. “Now that you’re a star in the big time, do you ever think of you and me . . .”
During this time, Thomas was on the road as stage manager for Your Arms Too Short to Box with God, and our relationship was off-again, on-again. While he was away for a few months, I basically put a turnstile at my door as I rotated through Phil, Rudy, Pascale, Perry, Ken, and Tyrell.