'Hairspray' Is an Aerosol Version of the Real Baltimore

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 20, 2007

BALTIMORE The city on the bay is awash -- the citizens would say "awarsh" -- with local heroes this week. The great Cal Ripken is about to enter baseball's Hall of Fame and Cal Love is so dense the vapors bring moisture to your eyes and clear your complexion. But there's more than enough love to go around, and another load of it is being dumped on another Baltimorean of transcendental grace, bad boy (but in a good way) director John Waters.

The dapper, ironic iconoclast is enjoying a cone of white-hot attention as a big, gaudy movie version of the Broadway musical version of his 1988 pop art confection "Hairspray" opens today.

These gentlemen have much in common, and it's not an ability to go to the left and make a backhand stop and a long throw, though it would be highly amusing to see the elegant wisp that is Waters try such a thing, especially in his lime-green shoes, socks and slacks. The salient point, however, is that they, and they alone, kept what the locals derisively call "Charm City" on the national map at a time when it had been deserted by its football team and much of its industry, was plagued with bitter, pointless dope crime and seemingly about to drop off into Toledohood or Dubuqueism.

Other similarities: Both had skill but not much range; both were good-size, gangly fellows; both found a niche where they excelled and performed feats of grace hitherto unseen. Both were locals; neither left town to make it big nationally. Both were gifted not only with talent but with charisma. They attracted followers by the bushelful and always brought a little sizzle into the venue with them. Cal stood for decency, duty, endurance, fair play and honesty. John stood for exactly the opposite, with a good dose of sexual perversity thrown in. Each achieved an easeful maturity that was even more charming than they'd had in youth. Each moved aside willingly and with good manners when the time came for younger usurpers to take center stage; if embittered, they kept their beefs quiet.

And each did something no one else had done before. Ripken played in 2,632 consecutive major league games; Waters got a guy to eat dog poop on camera.

Of such sublime achievements is greatness made. But it must also be said that each, in a gentle and unintended way, perpetuated a fraud, represented an unattainable ideal, offered dreams in a city of squalor. That is evident on sports talk radio, which has pretty much turned into all Cal, all the time, a river of adoration, where the shortstop's limited range and less than stellar lifetime batting average go largely unmentioned. It was also evident Wednesday night at the arty and beloved Charles Theatre, just above the train station and the world's ugliest statue, where the half-green, all-rosy Waters appeared as the central icon in a ritual as old as Hollywood itself: the premiere.

For geezers, it brought back a few memories, and the contrast between then and now was jarring.

It so happened that I covered the first Waters premiere in Baltimore, not for "Hairspray" in '88 but for his earlier bust-out, "Polyester," in 1981. ("Hairspray" premiered at another venerable Baltimore theater, the Senator, on Feb. 16, 1988.)

Immediate differences:

1981: No TV cameras.

2007: 11 TV cameras.

1981: Waters wore black.

2007: Waters wore green.

1981: Three reporters.

2007: 50 reporters.

1981: The Charles was a dump.

2007: Refurbished, the Charles is an urban glory.

1981: Divine wore red sequins, had a ravishing decolletage and the body language of Ava Gardner in anguish.

2007: Travolta wore jeans and Roper boots -- but on Letterman, rather than in Baltimore, that night.

1981: No Zac Efron.

2007: Too much Zac Efron.

Possibly the Zac Efron factor is what consecrated the Wednesday night affray into what felt like a druidic rite: The young, beautiful boy -- a co-star of the film and the upcoming "High School Musical 2" -- so out-charisma-ed everybody that there was no contest. Of the 300 or so witnesses, 295 or so were young women who had yet to reach puberty, and Zac's radiance seemed to prod them toward cannibalistic glee. I feared they would eat him alive and thought of Sebastian in "Suddenly, Last Summer" or Goya's "Saturn Devouring His Children." Even the unshockable Waters seemed a little shocked by the throaty, phlegmy hunger lurking under the pretty surface of the wanton teenette swarm.

But the real difference was bigger: Waters, or at least Waters's image of Baltimore, had somehow gone corporate, backed by the studio that turned out "The Lord of the Rings" movies, embraced by city and media, celebrated by the masses. His Baltimore had become a franchise, almost a zone of a theme park. Call it Baltimoreland.

Waters's movie is set in 1962, and the third-generation musical, directed by Adam Shankman and also starring Michelle Pfeiffer, Christopher Walken and Queen Latifah, retains the chronological anchor. But of course such a Baltimore lives only in sentimentalized memory, if there. It's a place of funky neighborhoods, populated by happy peasants, some of them cross-dressed. The defining mark is the hairdo, a kind of individual tower of protein, a high-rise lacquered in place by aerosol droplets so that the ziggurat is as motionless as if built by slaves on the Mesopotamian plain. As for the men, the hair is weighted with glowing unguents that play sparkle games with the light. The do's signify the do-ers as fundamentally good, if benighted, folk, awaiting only some kind of messiah to lead them to the right thing.

In this Baltimore, there's change in the air, but not violence, not squalor, not hopelessness, not nihilism. A limitless future seems to beckon once we all decide to get along, and music and dance will be the healing power of the body politic. No families will be burned to death in their beds for snitching out dopers, no witnesses will be shot in their driveways and no police commissioners will be forced out for their inability to deal with what is.

Instead, dance, love, common human themes, all bring people together. Differentness, initially squashed, was encouraged. "Hairspray" watches as the old order, represented by the conformity of that aerated goop cloud that embalms each hair in its place, begins to give way to spontaneity, to mingling, to wildness, to Dionysian possibility, all accelerated by the fundamental goodness of the people to whom it was happening.

That image of Baltimore, changing merrily, became the Baltimore of record: so unhip it was hip, so uncool it was cool. Long forgotten is the fact that in the beginning many Baltimoreans hated Waters for his trick of processing an elegant, intellectual city with powerhouse financial, advertising and shipping chops into a kind of Happy Valley U.S.A. of mild, funky rebels and hair enameled lifeless and piled to the stars. Soon the Waters view prevailed, not necessarily a bad thing, and everybody bought into it. "Hon," that exemplar of down-home Bawlamore charm (and not mumbled, embittered Baltimore condescension), became so positive an identifier it was featured on a welcome-to-Baltimore sign on the B-W Parkway.

It's okay. That's the way it goes. When the legend conflicts with the truth, print the legend, as John Ford knew. Waters is not a documentary filmmaker; he's a mythmaker, a parable-spinner, an illusion merchant. But you can't forget what's there, too, a vast, flat, hot tragedy, where young men pop each other at record pace and nobody seems to know why or what to do. In a few happy glades -- Federal Hill, Homeland, Canton -- one can live as elegant an urban life as anywhere in America, enjoying a Georgetown at Patapsco River basin prices. But go out on Federal Hill at night, and you see before you the Inner Harbor all agleam, the bold new downtown skyline, and have the sense of a town that seized on the fame and momentum Waters and Ripken lent it, and did its best to become what it seemed to be.

But don't listen to the sirens that blaze into the dark night, or pay attention to the blinking police and emergency service vehicles that look like blood-red pulsing pinpricks in the dark seen from the sleek buildings around the harbor far from where the real dying happens far too frequently. And don't contemplate this heart of tragedy. In '88, a critic wrote, "Hairspray the stuff and 'Hairspray' the movie are basically about the same thing: control, and the eternal question of whose finger is on the button." In 2007, here's a terrible possibility not foreseeable in 1988: Nobody's finger is on the button.