'I hope Leslie Van Houten can be given a second chance,' he writes. Van Houten, a former cultist, has spent decades in prison trying to rehabilitate herself as a citizen after her participation in the 'Manson Family's' murders of Leno and Rosemary LaBianca.

But his treatment of his friend Leslie Van Houten is completely different: touching in its compassion and overwhelming in its impact. The word they used for Little Richard was 'flamboyant.' 'Īt the comical high point of the book, Waters, like Little Richard, imagines himself as a preacher, but one with a unified sensibility, holy-rolling in 'a rapture of rottenness,' soaring from cult filmmaker to cult leader. But a lot of what scared people was never spoken about.

And he really scared the white folk for every reason. He really was outrageous, and so ahead of his time, and so talented. 'Still,' Waters hastens to add, 'Little Richard was a huge influence when I was young. But then he got nervous when I asked him about it, I guess since I was coming from Playboy. I thought his book was great, it was what rock-and-roll biography is supposed to be. And he seems to think it's fine as long as one world doesn't know about the other world. He wants to be a successful minister and a successful rock 'n' roller, and it's hard to please both worlds. Now smiling at the jarring encounter from the comfort of his Baltimore home, Waters says that the problem with Little Richard is that 'he wants two lives. He freaked out when he realized that Waters, who was interviewing him for Playboy, would cover the racier aspects of his just-published 'The Life and Times of Little Richard,' which Waters dubs 'the best and most-shocking celebrity tell-all book ever written.' That created a typhoon of style and gallows humor.' 'Poor whites came to work in the factories, blacks were already here, and so was old money, white money. One of Martin's daughters, Joy, now runs it.) Waters says he knows where Baltimore got its creative ferment. He pays tributes to Baltimore characters like irrepressible, foul-mouthed Esther Martin, owner of the 'coolest bar' in town, the Club Charles (formerly the Wigwam), who ruled a clientele that shifted from 'bums' to 'artsy hillbillies, gay outcasts and cool gearheads.' (Waters still adores the place.

('An alcoholic one night of the week, a workaholic the other six,' he notes.) It's here that he found his outrageous wit and established the work and play habits that he brings from city to city. His doormen in New York's Greenwich Village and San Francisco's Nob Hill always tell him, 'Welcome home.' 'But Baltimore is my home,' he says, as well as the wellspring of his inspiration. He loves the time he spends in Provincetown. One of the greatest subjects in the book is Baltimore.

Role models by john waters