Quentin Crisp

Biography

Quentin Crisp (born Denis Charles Pratt; (1908-12-25)25 December 1908 – (1999-11-21)21 November 1999) was an English raconteur whose personal expression broke social norms of the era. Crisp gained notoriety for the 1968 memoir The Naked Civil Servant, popularized by its 1975 screen adaptation. Her flamboyant personality, fashion, and wit made Crisp a queer icon, and a sensation in live solo appearances later in life. Crisp worked briefly as a rent boy during her teen years, then spent three decades as a professional artist's model for life classes in art colleges. The interviews she gave about her unusual life attracted great curiosity, and she was soon sought after for her personal views on social manners and the cultivation of style. Her solo stage show was a long-running hit both in Britain and America, and she also appeared in films and on television. Crisp defied convention by criticising both gay liberation and Diana, Princess of Wales. Some of Crisp's public remarks regarding the AIDS crisis earned censure from gay activists and human rights advocates.

== Biography ==

=== Early life === Denis Charles Pratt was born at Wolverton, Egmond Road, Sutton, Surrey, on 25 December 1908, the fourth and youngest child of "feckless and frequently unemployed" solicitor Spencer Charles Pratt, and former governess Frances Marion, née Phillips. She changed her name to Quentin Crisp in her twenties after leaving home, and expressed a feminine appearance to a degree that shocked contemporary Londoners and provoked "gay-bashing" assaults. By her own account, Crisp was "effeminate" from an early age, resulting in her being teased while at Kingswood House School. Around this time, Crisp began visiting the cafés of Soho, her favourite being The Black Cat in Old Compton Street, meeting young gay men and rent boys, and experimenting with make-up and women's clothes. For six months, she worked as a prostitute; in a 1998 interview, she said she was looking for love, but found only degradation.

=== Middle years === Crisp attempted to join the British army at the outbreak of the Second World War, but was rejected and declared exempt by the medical board on the grounds that she was "suffering from sexual perversion". In 1940, she moved into a first-floor flat at 129 Beaufort Street, Chelsea, a bed-sitting room that she occupied until she emigrated to the United States in 1981. She remained in London during the 1941 Blitz, stocked up on cosmetics, purchased two pounds of henna and later paraded through the streets during the black-out, picking up G.I.s. In the intervening years, she never attempted any housework, writing famously in her memoir The Naked Civil Servant: "After the first four years the dirt doesn't get any worse." Crisp left her job as an engineer's tracer in 1942 to become a model in life classes in London and the Home Counties. Crisp wanted to call her book My Reign in Hell, but her agent insisted on The Naked Civil Servant, an insistence that later gave her pause when she offered the manuscript to Tom Maschler of Jonathan Cape on the same day that Desmond Morris delivered The Naked Ape. The Naked Civil Servant was published in 1968 to generally good reviews, although it initially only sold 3,500 copies. Crisp was then approached by the documentary film maker Denis Mitchell to be the subject of a 1968 short film in which she discussed her life and lifestyle. The documentary aired on British television in 1971.

=== Fame ===

After the success of the film, her autobiography was reprinted; Gay News commented that it should have been published posthumously (Crisp said that this was their polite way of telling her to drop dead). Gay rights campaigner Peter Tatchell said he had met Crisp in 1974, and alleged that she was not sympathetic to the Gay Liberation movement of the time. Tatchell said Crisp quipped: "What do you want liberation from? What is there to be proud of? I don't believe in rights for homosexuals." By now, Crisp was a theatre-filling humourist; in 1978, her one-man show sold out London's Duke of York's Theatre. She then took the show to New York. Her first stay in the Hotel Chelsea coincided with a fire, a robbery, and the death of Nancy Spungen. Crisp decided to move to New York permanently and, in 1981, found a small apartment at 46 East 3rd Street in Manhattan's East Village. As she had done in London, Crisp allowed her telephone number to be listed in the telephone directory. She saw it as her duty to converse with anyone who called her, saying "If you don't have your name in the phone book, you're stuck with your friends. How will you ever enlarge your horizons?"

Crisp continued to perform her one-man show, published books on the importance of contemporary manners as a means of social inclusion (as opposed to etiquette, which she claimed is socially exclusive), and supported herself by accepting social invitations and writing film reviews and columns for UK and US magazines and newspapers. She said that provided one could exist on peanuts and champagne, one could quite easily live by going to every cocktail party, premiere and first night to which one was invited.

=== Last years === Crisp remained fiercely independent and unpredictable into old age. She caused controversy and confusion in the gay community by (perhaps jokingly) calling AIDS "a fad", and homosexuality "a terrible disease". Crisp was a stern critic of Diana, Princess of Wales, and her attempts to gain public sympathy following her divorce from Prince Charles. She stated: "I always thought Diana was such trash and got what she deserved. She was Lady Diana before she was Princess Diana, so she knew the racket. She knew that royal marriages have nothing to do with love. You marry a man and you stand beside him on public occasions and you wave and for that you never have a financial worry until the day you die." Following her death in 1997, she commented that it was perhaps her "fast and shallow" lifestyle that led to her demise: "She could have been Queen of England – and she was swanning about Paris with Arabs. What disgraceful behaviour! Going about saying she wanted to be the queen of hearts. The vulgarity of it is so overpowering." In 1997, Crisp was crowned king of the Beaux-Arts Ball run by the Beaux Arts Society. She presided alongside Queen Audrey Kargere, Prince George Bettinger and Princess Annette Hunt.