by Joe E. Jeffreys
Frances Milstead tells a story about a recent vacation and her tour of a historic house. "The guide was telling us about the furniture and describing the wardrobe. He said that in those days little boys wore dresses. I don't know what the hell happened to me but I said, 'Oh, my son was 42 and he wore a dress.' The guy who was giving the tour looked over at me and asked, 'Who is your son?' I said, 'You ever hear of this guy Divine?' He said, 'No, don't tell me. You're his mother!' Well, that was the end of the tour. We sat and talked for three hours. Never did see the rest of the house."
Everybody, at least for now, has a mother somewhere. The outrageous and outlandish late great star of John Water's films from Pink Flamingos to Female Trouble and Hairspray, Divine was no exception. Turns out Mother Divine is quite a character herself and has written a book about her son's life and career and their relationship.
Describing herself as "a young 80," Frances Milstead is now retired and living outside Miami, Fla. She participates in line dancing three times a week and takes aerobic exercise classes in the swimming pool. While in her 50s she had a brief career as a belly dancer and says she has always been a clothes horse.
"I relived my life to write this," she says of My Son Divine. The book traces the story of her and her family's life from when she met her husband Harris to the birth of their only child Glenn to her reaction and how she discovered that he was also this person named Divine.
"He was a lovable child who liked to make people laugh," she recalls of her son who would become one of the 20th Century's great icons, "he had a wonderful personality and used to always say 'I'm a star.'" Little could anyone have guessed the type of star or impact he would have as Divine.
The book reads like Mommie Dearest in reverse. Instead of the child writing nasty things about the parent, in this case the parent has written a loving and honest look at her child's life. Being a parent to Glenn was not always easy; he constantly wrote bad checks and charged extravagances to his parent's accounts. While the family was estranged for nearly a decade, the period in which he cemented the Divine image, they eventually reconciled. Frances fondly recalls "the good times we had together in his later life." At a peak in his career, Hairspray had just been released to universal praise, Divine died suddenly in his sleep in March 1988. Frances notes that her husband Harris died the same week in March five years later. "March comes along, I stay in bed," she wryly notes.
"The book was a healing process," she says of its development. Written over a three-year period with the help of Steve Yeager, director of the documentary Divine Trash, and Kevin Heffernan, co- writer of the John Water's documentary In Bad Taste, the book flashes photos on nearly every page, many never before seen. Many hilarious and often insightful celebrity remembrances of Divine pepper its pages from John Waters to Ricki Lake to Zandra Rhodes and Mink Stole.
Frances freely offers other agendas for writing the book as well. "Everybody was making money off my son's life and I thought. 'Here I am, I need money. Why don't I do a book and tell the truth?' There are a lot of things that I have read that are not true. I'm gonna write the truth and that's what I did."
She takes particular issue with material in Bernard Jay's 1993 biography Not Simply Divine! ( Jay was Divine's manager for many years. ) Though she claims she has never read his book, Frances says with the hurt of only a mother's heart, "There are a lot of things Bernard wrote in his book. It hurt my feelings when people called me up and told me about it. Things he said about Glenn. Wasn't the same kid I knew. Here's a man that helped support him for 10 years and he talked bad about him after he's dead. I don't like that. I claim to be a good Christian person. I try to treat everybody right and I hope everybody treats me right. If you can't say anything good about a person after he's dead don't say anything." In fact, it appears that some of the things Frances wrote about Bernard Jay in her book, which still gives his book a good lashing, had to be redacted before it was granted clearance for publication.
Though she says she has never been in drag, nor ever saw her son in drag in the flesh but only on film ( "And that's the god's truth." ) , and grew up during a time and in a place where she did not know what a gay person was, now she becomes upset "when I see Jerry Falwell or anybody else talking bad against gays. We come to church we learn to love one another. This is what Jesus teaches us. I know a lot of gay people and they're really better to me than my own family. I can't understand why people want to talk against other people. Against Blacks, against obese people."
The ever complex woman who gave birth to and raised one of the world's great entertainers and gay pioneers says that if there is a message to her book or her son's life it would be this: "Love who you are. Love yourself. I think that's the way Glenn would want it." Thank you, Mother Divine. Thank you.
My Son Divine by Frances Milstead with Kevin Heffernan and Steve Yeager, Alyson Books, 256 pages, $18.95, ISBN#: 1555835945, November 2001.