Tim Curry Does the Time Warp

But Curry’s career encompasses much more than “Rocky Horror.” A particularly delectable villain, he’s played Little Orphan Annie’s abductor (“Annie”), Long John Silver (“Muppet Treasure Island”), the Lord of Darkness (“Legend”), and the world’s scariest clown (“It”). He’s appeared in comedies as a mystery-solving butler (“Clue”), a harried concierge (“Home Alone 2: Lost in New York”), and King Arthur (“Spamalot”), and he had a feral, if short-lived, rock career.

“I have been described as everything from a confounding sex symbol, to a home designer, to a rock ’n’ roll singer, to an imposter, to the prince of Halloween, to a paralyzed tragic case, to a dead legend,” he writes in his new memoir, “Vagabond.” The “paralyzed” part comes from a stroke he had in 2012, which curtailed his ability to walk or use the left half of his body. (He nicknamed his idle left hand Teddy.) He’s retained his verbal acuity and, judging from a recent interview, his louche, black-cherry wit. Now seventy-nine, Curry spoke to me from his house in Los Angeles, his head propped up on red pillows.

He was on bed rest, by doctor’s orders, he told me, though a few weeks later he’d appear, in his wheelchair, at an anniversary screening of “Rocky Horror” at the Academy Museum. Outside was a garden in which he was growing banana and palm trees. “I’ve been planting a little jungle,” he said. He spoke haltingly, with effort, but occasionally let out a deep, sultry laugh that brought me right back to Transsexual, Transylvania. Our conversation, which has been edited and condensed, covered David Bowie, Studio 54, working with Miss Piggy, and more. In your book, you say that you don’t admire the part of show business that involves making your private life public.

So how did you wind up writing a memoir? I’ve been asked to write one several times, and I had a real gap in my schedule, and I didn’t have any immediate work, so I thought I would invent my own work. You say that, since your stroke, you’ve had trouble with short-term memory but a “new relationship” with your long-term memory. When you travel back in your mind, where do you tend to wind up? I’ve recently been recording the audiobook, and I found that, when I was describing an event or a place, I saw it very easily.

That was confusing, actually, because I felt like I was still there. Is it emotional to see your life flash by like that? It is, because you never know how long your life is going to be. Mine has been long already, by any standard, so I’m glad of that. You have a vivid recall for your childhood, in particular the period around when your father died, when you were eleven. I was twelve when he died—eleven when he got really sick after he had a stroke, oddly like me. I have a very vivid memory of him being taken into an ambulance and leaving for the hospital. He told me to look after my mother. That confused me a lot. I thought, How am I going to do that?

But he was concerned about her, of course, and I guess he was saying, “Be the man of the house now.” Equally daunting. It seems like your mother had difficulty caring for two grieving children. You write, “I brought a little mischief into my encounters with my mother: doing whatever I could to make the darkness sparkle.” Well, she had a hair-trigger temper. I think she was actually bipolar. She certainly didn’t suffer fools gladly. Make no mistake, I loved her very much—and she loved me, almost too much.

I was very much the child that she concentrated on, I guess because I was a boy. When we see you as Pennywise in “It” or as the Lord of Darkness in “Legend,” is that a version of making the darkness sparkle? No, it’s just darkness. I had experience with darkness rather too early in my life, when my father died. I felt very alone. And I realized too early that the world could be very unpredictable and dark. There was no guarantee of happiness. Your emergence as an actor wasn’t so much through classic theatre at the Royal Shakespeare Company—although you did work there—as through the counterculture. Your first job out of college was in the 1968 production of “Hair” in London.

I can only imagine, in Swinging London, what kind of scene that was. It was quite a jump from university, because the show was the flavor of the month, and we were invited everywhere. And Swinging London was Swinging London. Personality was king. And style, too. What was your personal style in the late sixties? I was a fairly conventional hippie. I was a tree hugger, and I did too many drugs. Soft drugs, but enough of them to—well, I don’t know whether you consider LSD soft. I did it the first time on the Eiffel Tower. Very weird. I had taken some and it hadn’t kicked in, but I was due at a cocktail party on the Eiffel Tower, which was a launch of Dubonnet. It was a bit surreal.

There was an enormous bottle of Dubonnet, and there was the Paris cast of “Hair,” and I looked out over the Seine and over Paris itself and the city seemed to be breathing, which was mind-changing. I had very little fear about what I might be doing to my mind. I was dumb enough not to care. Sounds worth it, honestly. It was worth it. It took a jackhammer to my imagination, that’s for sure. Let’s talk about “Rocky Horror.” Can you describe how you created the look for Frank-N-Furter? I didn’t really create it myself. I was grimly unaware when I read the role and started to rehearse it that the national costume of Transylvania was a corset and whatever else you put with it.

But the costume designer, Sue Blane, had worked with me before in a remarkable repertory theatre in Glasgow, Scotland, called the Citizens Theatre, where we had done a production of “The Maids,” by Jean Genet. I played one of the rather grubby sisters, Solange. And Sue designed that outfit. For “Rocky Horror,” she went to a market in Glasgow called the Barras, where all kinds of crap was sold, and she found a Victorian corset for three pounds. I wore it back to front. [Laughs.] And you did your own makeup, right? I did. I wanted him to look like he’d been dragged through a hedge backwards. All the eye makeup, which there was a lot of, was smudged.

I didn’t want him to be too clever with the makeup—to still look like a man underneath. When we did the movie, a guy called Pierre La Roche did the makeup. He had famously done a look for David Bowie—he invented Ziggy Stardust, the look of Ziggy. His makeup for me was a lot more polished and runway-ready. I didn’t like it at first. I suppose I could have smudged it with a finger, but I respected his work, and I respected that Jim Sharman, the director, whom I admired enormously, wanted me to look like that. One of the themes in the book is exploring contradictions, in both yourself and your characters.

You write that “Rocky Horror” is “a sexual free-for-all, but behind that, it’s an interrogation of power.” What kind of contradictions did you see in Frank-N-Furter? It was important that the audience was aware that he could fuck anybody and was dangerous sexually. He was a very powerful figure, and he liked to run everything and dictate scenarios. So when I was putting him together, there were deliberately holes in the fishnet tights. He looked like a rather battered street character. You write about playing Frank-N-Furter, “I learned not to limit myself—artistically, professionally, sexually, or mentally.” How did that character transform your sense of yourself?

Did it have to do with masculinity and femininity, exploring both sides of yourself? I did decide not to limit myself to anything, and I believed that I could do anything. It gave me a lot of oomph—a lot of strength—to back up my own decisions about my life. And I certainly didn’t limit myself sexually, particularly. I thought that was important at the time. I swam “the warm waters of sins of the flesh,” to quote the play and the movie. You have never been forthcoming about your sexuality, and you say up front in the book that you’re not going to discuss your love affairs.

Is there a particular reason you feel comfortable talking about, say, the drugs you did or your relationship with your mother, but draw the line at sexual identity? Well, I think that my romantic life is none of anybody’s business, and I say so rather thoroughly in the book. There’s a lot of profanity in the book, which I somewhat regret, because I have too much respect for the language to give it over completely to Anglo-Saxon. Of course, you have every right not to disclose what you don’t want to. The thing I wondered about, though, was: being Dr. Frank-N-Furter made you a queer icon, and 1975 was in the heat of the gay-liberation movement.

I imagine that would be very different for a gay man versus a straight man, for instance—suddenly having all that attention on you. I don’t know. Several people have played him, and some of them have asked me how to. I’ve told them that camp is to be avoided at all costs. He’s a guy, and he can indeed fuck anybody, and that has to be clear in the way that he behaves, not just in bed but out of it. It’s a kind of pansexuality, really. Somebody described him as an omnivore, which I quite liked. He doesn’t leave much more than bones. Did it make you feel incredibly sexy to be singing “Sweet Transvestite”? It did. And I felt very, very strong.

It’s as much about courage as anything else, I think. You say that when you did the movie, the main thing you changed was figuring out how to “seduce the camera.” How did you seduce the camera? I decided to take it on aggressively, because the camera is really an observer, and I made very sure that he noticed me. There’s a story about an actor called Akim Tamiroff, who played a lot of villains in fifties and sixties movies, going up and hugging the camera. Somebody said, “Why did you do that?” And he said, “This camera, she hates me. I want to make her looove me.” I don’t know how you do it.

I think you have to, in a curious way, distill yourself for the camera, and the great movie stars of the past have done that. I still don’t understand it, but I try to learn with each new experience. What was your relationship with Meat Loaf, whom you murder with an axe in the movie? We were great friends, actually. I remember a moment when he was in New York with his girlfriend, later his wife, Leslie Loaf, which is what we all called her, and he said, “Timmy, I’m more famous than you are”—because he had a huge hit record, his very first album.

I don’t remember which hotel we were in, but it was probably on one of the major avenues of Manhattan, and he said, “You and I should just walk down the street and see who recognizes who.” I said all right, and we did it. In fact, nobody recognized either of us. I thought that was funny. And he didn’t. He had an enormous ego. How did you wind up in New York in the late seventies, and where were you living? I wanted to try it, really, and I was living in the Village, on Jones Street. I had met Kathleen Turner, and her husband, Jay, was a real-estate mogul in Manhattan. He got one of his minions to find me an apartment.

It was like a small loft, and I had a tiny roof garden. You tell this story about going to Studio 54 which is like a dream someone might have about seventies New York. I was good friends with James Taylor and Carly Simon, and she called me one day and said that she wanted to go to Studio 54 and asked if I would go with her. At the time, [the co-owner] Steve Rubell, as a sort of publicity stunt, had started turning away celebrities in order to make the newspapers. So she was nervous about getting in, and she wanted backup.

She picked me up in a car with a driver, and when we got across the street she sent the driver in to make sure that she could get in, which was a little pusillanimous, really. But we got in O.K. And Steve Rubell was actually a very charming host, and he took us up to the d.j. booth, where Truman Capote was the d.j. He used to like to do that. Steve said, “This is Tim Curry and Carly Simon.” And he said to Carly, “I knew your father”—her father was Simon of Simon & Schuster. That was about it for that exchange. We didn’t stay very long, but it was fascinating, because people used to take great pains in the way that they looked. What were you wearing? I don’t remember.

I don’t think I was a figure of fashion. Probably some kind of grungy T-shirt and jeans. But people certainly used to express themselves. There was a guy called Rollerena, who used to dress in drag and go everywhere on roller skates. Famously, of course, Bianca Jagger rode a white horse there at her birthday party. You could get away with anything, really. I want to ask about your career as a vocalist in the late seventies and early eighties. I actually have your second album, “Fearless,” from 1979, on vinyl—a friend gave it to me as a gift. I really enjoy your cover of the Joni Mitchell song “Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire.” Thank you. I liked that song very much. I like her very much.

I’ve covered several of her songs. But I thought of it as the ultimate junkie song. I imagined “cold blue steel” as a syringe. You write about how, during that period in New York, you took to cocaine “like a duck to water.” Maybe my favorite fact in the whole book is that your dealer was a member of the string section of the New York Philharmonic. I think he played the cello. It’s extraordinary, isn’t it? I don’t know how that happened. But he was a very nice man, as opposed to most coke dealers, I imagine. He felt he was helping out another artist, I think. Did cocaine help you as an artist? As a writer, it did. It gave me a kick to start writing lyrics and music.

I started to rely on it too much, really, for that purpose, and I deliberately stopped, to see if I could do it without. Thank God, I could. And thank God it was easy to stop. For some people it isn’t. I found it easy enough, because I knew why I wanted to stop: I wanted an unpolluted mind. Why do you think your music career didn’t take off? Quite simply, because it didn’t have any big enough hits. I sold quite a lot of albums, but I never sold singles, which are pretty much the key to a rock-and-roll career. I had a radio hit, called “I Do the Rock,” which discerning d.j.s played for a while. What was your relationship with David Bowie?

You mention him a couple of times in the book, and you both had a certain androgynous glam persona. He was a rocker who also did films; you were an actor who was also making records. I liked him a lot. He was part of a troupe in Scotland that was run by a man called Lindsay Kemp, which was pretty outrageous, and I saw him in one or two of their offerings. He came to see “Rocky Horror” at the Chelsea Classic, in its first iteration. He came with his wife, Angie, and a small entourage. Actually, it’s said that Angie Bowie was the first person to talk back to the characters.

I made my entrance down a runway raised above the audience, and he fairly ostentatiously put his hands above his head and applauded when I came on, although he couldn’t have seen me from behind. Somebody must have nudged him, I guess. Were you ever in competition for roles? I can imagine him as a great Dr. Frank-N-Furter, but I can also imagine you as the man who fell to Earth, or the King of the Goblins in “Labyrinth.” I would have been happy to play either of them. No, I don’t think he ever harbored ambitions [about “Rocky Horror.”] Mick Jagger wanted to play Frank-N-Furter for the movie, and of course the studio was rather thrilled about that.

But Jim Sharman was very loyal and insisted that I play it. Thank God for that. I think the movie I’ve seen you the most in, because I played it on a loop over and over again as a child, is “Annie.” I came to appreciate only later that it was directed, surprisingly, by John Huston, the legend of Old Hollywood. He was a gruff old man at that point. What do you remember about being directed by him? He was presented with me as being cast, so he didn’t have any choice in the matter, I don’t think. But I went to meet him at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. I was very impressed, because he was pretty iconic by then.

And he said [growls], “Whaddaya think you’re gonna do with the role?” I said that I’d been observing a stagehand at “Amadeus”—I was playing Mozart on Broadway—and he was kind of fidgety. He had a very particular kind of physicality. And he said, “Well, do it for me.” And I did. He said, “I think that’s very good.” That’s a great John Huston impression. Speaking of “Amadeus,” why didn’t you end up playing Mozart in the movie version? Good question. I was a little old, really. I was already over thirty-five. The director, Miloš Forman, was not impressed and cast Tom Hulce, who did a great job. Peter Shaffer, the playwright, wanted me to play Salieri in the movie, and he made Miloš audition me.

So I did a screen test as Salieri, which was a disaster. They jammed a wig on my head, a rather ratty one, and I did the seduction scene with Constanze. And Miloš was even less impressed. He came to dinner at Peter Shaffer’s home, and I was a guest. Peter cooked roast lamb, and Miloš, who I think made a career of being unimpressed, said [thick Czech accent], “This very good. But let me invite you to my place and I cook lamb Czechoslovak way. We put it on a long fork and stick it in the fire.” It never happened, but I would have liked it to.

I’m sure it would have been rather raw. I want to ask about another of my favorite film roles of yours, Wadsworth the butler in “Clue.” Between “Rocky Horror” and “Clue,” you have a history of starring in movies that didn’t exactly burn up the box-office but then became cult classics. Is that a coincidence, or was it something about your taste or the way that you’re used as an actor? I don’t think that “Clue” ’s classic status was about me. It was about the genre, really, and Jonathan Lynn’s script, which was very funny and elegant. We went to the same boarding school, and he was the star actor of the school and kind of my hero.

He had a hit TV series as a writer, called “Yes Minister,” which was about the comic possibilities of the government bureaucracy in Britain, and John Landis had seen it. “Clue” was the brainchild of a small group of what were then called Baby Moguls, which included John. I think at one point John was going to direct it, but he gave the task to Johnny Lynn. I came out to L.A. to rehearse it, and I got one of those standing bicycles, because I thought that I was too fat to be on camera. I have an uncertain metabolism, shall we say—I gain weight very easily. So I used to pump away on this bike and stomp around Beverly Hills.

We rehearsed for two or three weeks before we started shooting, which doesn’t usually happen in movies. It does feel kind of like a play. Even people who haven’t seen it know Madeline Kahn’s “flames on the side of my face” speech. What was your experience with her? I loved her. We got on very well, probably because I was an abject suitor who sat at her feet a lot. She just improvised that line, and it’s iconic. She was brilliant. Let’s jump ahead to “Home Alone 2.” It came out in 1992, and you play the concierge at the Plaza, where it was shot. At the time, the Plaza was owned by our future President, Donald Trump, who also had a cameo.

Can you describe your interactions with the Trumps? When Donald bought the Plaza, he hired his then wife, Ivana, to redecorate the hotel, and she had, shall we say, uncertain taste. For example, I remember that the lobby of the Plaza had a beautiful black-and-white terrazzo floor, which she covered in a rather cheap-looking Persian carpet. Very garish colors. When I moved in—I lived there for the duration of the filming—she knocked on my door and said, “I just would like to know how you like your room.” I said, “I’m very happy here, thank you.” She said, “I’m so glad, because I completely redid it.” And I was happy there—not particularly with the look of it. You could have used sunglasses.

And I had a view of a brick wall, which was not too glamorous. Donald had a new lady called Marla Maples, who was a sometime actress, putting it delicately. The two of them were a steady feature in the tabloids, if you remember. And Donald said to me [imitates Trump], “I want Marla to meet the director, because she’s a very talented actress.” I said, “Well, then, she should.” I don’t think it happened, but maybe they did meet.

He didn’t know much about acting, that’s for sure. The director, Chris Columbus, has said that he bullied his way into the movie as part of the arrangement to use the Plaza. [Trump has denied this.] I think he was determined to establish his relationship with the hotel, as the grand vizier. You write that acting across from Macaulay Culkin was “tiresome, because he tended to gabble.” He was very carefully drilled by his father to learn his lines, and he would just deliver them at high speed. Chris edited around him and would sometimes play his part for me when he was shooting my closeups. He was a nice kid, though.

He used to come into the makeup trailer rather dazed and confused, because he was exhausted—he’d been watching TV all night. You say that you and Joe Pesci were like “oil and water.” What was the problem with Joe Pesci? I’m not entirely sure, but I think he thought that I wasn’t stellar enough to be in the movie with him. A few years after that, you did “Muppet Treasure Island.” Did you have conflict with any of the Muppets? I didn’t. They’re my favorites, actually. One of the great things about working with them is that you come to see them as characters and not as puppets, which is down to the brilliance of the Muppeteers. I loved Miss Piggy.

We got on great. She’s difficult to share the spotlight with. She is. She’s a greedy girl. It was established in the script that we had, maybe sometime in the past, some kind of a fling together. And I improvised a line which never made it into the movie: “Once you’ve had pork, you never look back.” [Deep laugh.] I want to ask you about your life more recently. You had a stroke in 2012, while getting a massage. The months and years of recovery were, I imagine, a very trying time. It was a trying time, and still is. I’m still in recovery, partly because I’m having difficulties dealing with the wheelchair. I still can’t walk, and that’s awful, because I love to walk long distances.

I grew up with my father and his father, going on long walks through the countryside. My grandfather used to use a wooden walking stick and beat back the nettles—just savage them. More than anything, it gave me my appreciation for the countryside of Britain. With so much of your movement restricted, what’s kept you moving forward? It must have required a lot of will power. I guess it did. But I live quite happily in my mind.

And I, in the words of my mother, just got on with it. You’ve always been an incredibly physical performer: your strut during “Sweet Transvestite” in “Rocky Horror,” or the way you run around unfurling the mystery at the end of “Clue.” Do you still feel that in your body? Does that live somewhere in you still? I think it does, but it’s angry. My mobility is angry to get out. But it’s not happened yet. I do a certain amount of physical therapy. I did a whole bunch of it at Cedars-Sinai, and I got very close, I think, to walking. That was tantalizing. For insurance reasons, I had to withdraw.

And I have a visiting physical therapist now, but I can only really do exercises from my bed, which is pretty pathetic. It’s not going to get me walking, I don’t believe. I guess I’m asking what it’s like to think about your younger self doing these incredibly exciting, physical, dynamic roles that still live on the screen. Do they live in you the same way, even without that freedom of movement? They do. They’re a part of me. I think we all probably have an attitude toward our history, and I cherish mine. ♦