"Steve Tyler has a new book out where he says I
fucked him!" Monti Rock III told me in his Bronx-inflected baritone,
about a minute into the first phone conversation I had ever had with
him. "Can you believe that crap? Says I took him home, gave him a bunch
of drugs and fucked him. Isn't that the craziest shit you ever heard?"
Actually, it's not, but only because I'd already
spent a night with Monti - I first met him in 2003 at his fourth annual
60th birthday party in Vegas.
"He says I drugged him and fucked him," Monti went
on, "but that's total bullshit. I would never have fucked him. No way. I
fucked Bowie, but I never fucked Steve Tyler. He's not my type at all.
Please!"
When a rock star accuses Monti Rock III of
slipping him Placidyl and raping him with a pet chimp and a couple of
mastiffs looking on (Tyler calls it "a snapshot of a certain scene in
New York, 1965," in his appallingly bad autobiography Walk this Way)
it's a latter-day career highlight for Monti. He was excited, as
always, by the scent of limelight.
Born in the Bronx, the sixth and youngest child of
Puerto Rican charismatic Pentecostal street preachers, Joey Montanez had
to struggle for recognition from the start. His father had not wanted to
have a sixth child, and he certainly didn't want one who was a sickly
mama's boy with a nelly streak a mile wide. When his parents discovered
love letters from a wealthy Manhattan man, they attempted to exorcise
Monti's demons with the help of a group of clubwielding friends and
relatives. Monti realized it was time for him to leave the nest and find
his own way in the world. He packed a bag and became a full-time Times
Square hustler. He was fourteen.
For a while he survived by turning tricks and
serving as the kept boy of Manhattan society queens - "boring, pompous
old faggots and their fuckin' tea parties," Monti recalls. But his Will
to Fabulousness was not to be denied. He learned how to cut hair, and by
the early 60s the force of his personality (and his street-hardened
hustling chops) had taken him straight to the top of the trendy NYC
fashion scene. He toured the European fashion capitals when he was just
22, styling the likes of Diana Vreeland, Ali McGraw, Natalie Wood, and
Nancy Sinatra. Monti Rock had arrived.
"The Sixties were a fantasy and I helped create
it," he reminisced to the New Yorker in 1972. This coked-out,
exuberantly foul-mouthed figure in his see-through voile shirts, velvet
and brocade suits, mottled iguana-skin boots, gaudy jewelry, feather
boas and shoulder-length hair was only too happy to assess the cultural
significance of his creative genius. "I'm the originator of costume, I'm
the originator of honesty. I'm the phony that created life for the rest
of the people. I gave them a license to be freaks."
Thirty years on, he's still at it, maintaining his
"fixture" status on the Vegas scene by indefatigably criss-crossing the
city in his custom-painted Ford Contour - bumper-to-bumper leopard-skin
with caricatures of his profile on the doors, cherubs on the hood and" A
Legend in His Own Mind" emblazoned across the rear. His zebra-skin
cowboy hat and the life-sized plush stuffed cat draped over his arm
complete the look.
Monti sets himself apart from the hordes of faded
show-biz lifers desperately struggling to rekindle their long-past
moments of glory. His best work was spectacular more as glorious
failure, by which measure he has never stopped outdoing himself. His
meteoric career as an NYC celebrity hairstylist,
fashion designer, and self-styled outrageous
bisexual It-boy of the international jet set concluded with a farewell
bash he threw at which he presented himself to his guests laid out in a
coffin in the center of a candle-filled room, having eaten a bottle of
pills.
Successfully parlaying this flush of fashionista
success into a gig making 15 grand a week opening for Liberace at
Caesar's Palace in 1968, Monti was hitting the big time. Though the
middle-American Shriners and housewives in the audience had knowingly
paid their hard-earned money to watch "Mr. Showmanship" flame his way
through a homoBaroque grand piano fantasy, they didn't know what to make
of Monti Rock. Management soon realized they'd been had and called him
on the carpet, accusing him to his face of having no act. Monti's
legendary retort: "Well who says I did?"
Not long afterward he downed a bottle of Pernod
before going on stage and wound up pratfalling magnificently into the
first row, earning him a bum's rush out the back door and a one-way
ticket out of town.
The obvious next step was Hollywood. "All I took
with me were my portraits of myself and my ego," he says without a hint
of irony. He started out in LA at the bottom, performing the story of
his life in shabby cabaret clubs on the wrong end of the Sunset Strip.
Openly acknowledging that he really doesn't have any talent or a proper
act to speak of is the foundation of Monti's shtick, yet somehow he
manages to be a compelling figure onstage, capable of inspiring
greatness in others.
"I saw Monti Rock III in 1969 on the Sunset Strip
at a place called Filthy McNasty's with six people in the audience," Tom
Waits told Buzz magazine in 1993. "He was crawling through a bitter and
distracted version of 'Tennesee Waltz' when he suddenly stopped the band
(the members of which were all wearing matching pink jumpsuits). The
room screamed with feedback as he threw his drink against the wall and
stabbed an amplifier with a mike stand, telling the six business suits
in the audience they were all bloodsuckers. He laughed nervously as he
sweated in the spotlight and delivered a purely psychotic confession
that resembled a cross between an execution and a striptease.
"I was there, and I knew that I wanted to get into
show business as soon as possible."
Johnny Carson, who evidently shared Waits' fine
sensibilities for freakdom, happened to catch Monti's act one night, and
was so captivated that he invited Monti onto the
Tonight Show.
Most of the people I've talked to who remember
Monti Rock remember him not for his disco hits (as "Disco Tex and his
Sex-o-Iettes" he sold millions of records, including the hit singles
"Get Dancin'" and "I Wanna Dance Wit' Choo"), but for the riveting,
indelible performances that marked probably the most successful and
widely-appreciated element of his decades-long show-biz career: namely,
appearing as a guest on television talk shows. No less an authority than
Howard Stern (who grew up marveling at Monti's appearances on "Uncle
Mervy" Griffin's daytime show) has called him "the greatest talk show
guest of all time."
Magnetic, irrepressible Monti was such a hit with
audiences that he would be invited back to work his magic on the
Tonight Show several times a year well into the late seventies,
eventually appearing in dozens of episodes despite rarely having a new
album or movie or tour to flog. He might come out in a tuxedo with
slicked-back hair, a charming, charismatic, nutty Puertoriqueno belting
his heart out in his expressive baritone. Or he might come out in
pancake makeup and Carmen Miranda drag. Monti wasn't merely "edgy," he
was totally From Beyond spontaneous, unpredictable, unfathomable,
occasionally erratic, and queer as a $3 bill - and yet square America
could relate to him when he sat in the chair talking to Johnny, thanks
to a disarmingly earnest, regular-guy quality and his compulsive,
self-deprecating honesty that (mostly) neutralized his more
self-indulgent excesses. Mainstream audiences had never seen anything
like him, and - for a while, at least - they couldn't seem to get enough
of him.
"I'm not a great singer. I'm not a great actor -
I'm a personality," he said in a 1975 interview, at the peak of his fame
(his Disco Tex album was in the Top Ten, which would lead to his cameo
in Saturday Night Fever as 'Monti,' the club DJ and dance contest
MC).
'Tm a character. Most performers hide behind an
act. I am the act." As he exulted in another interview from the same
period, "I'm the most successful nothing in show biz and they love me!"
He was close enough to smell and taste Fame, yet
Monti couldn't ever seem to find that last toe hold to get him over the
top. As the seventies ground down into the eighties, the opportunities
for gigs on stage, in the studio and before the television cameras
became ever fewer and farther between. It took him decades to get over
the disastrous denouement to his first, blown chance at stardom, but he
eventually faced down his fears and returned to the scene of the crime,
relocating to Vegas several years ago, in his sixties, to start over
once again. He became a ubiquitous gadfly on the Vegas showbiz scene,
got himself a gig writing a gossip column for Gaming Today, and
reinvented himself as the Desert Diva, the "outrageous, amusing,
unusual, grand ambassador to Las Vegas Entertainment."
Today, the parade of titles across his business
card has grown to include Publicist (read: "Demi-Celebrity for Hire: No
Event Too Small"), Creative Consultant, Casino Host, Reverend, and
Psychic. He's gotten himself noticed, in a way, earning recognition in
various "Best of Las Vegas" polls by pulling down such awards as "Most
Colorful Character 2003" (Review-Journal) and "Best at Milking
His 15 Minutes of Fame" (Las Vegas Life).
Monti has never fit comfortably within predefined
categories - even those seemingly custom made for him. Although he
refers to himself as an "old faggot" and has been with his current
partner, an older man, for over 30 years, he is ambivalent about his
status as a kitsch.. icon. "I'm bisexual, which I'm proud of," he has
said, and by all accounts he was an equal-opportunity swinger throughout
his hustling and high-society social climbing years. He even allegedly"
got confused and got married" a couple of times.
But Monti has always stressed his individuality,
his basic humanity, above any niche pigeonhole - especially now that
gayness has been so thoroughly co-opted by mainstream culture that it
hardly even qualifies as "alternative" any more. "I'm tired of being
gay; it's such a crowded field in this country," he laments bitterly. In
other words, if it doesn't actively serve to advance his career, what
good is it?
"The publisher is back on board with my
autobiography," Monti told me when I last spoke to him. "I've got the
autobiography, the new doo-wop show at Castaways, and I'm talking to MTV
about a new show with Tom Green where they would send me into people's
houses to terrorize them. It's fantastic, things are finally heating up
again for me."
Always the recitation of the exciting new in-the
works projects, like a mantra, often at the beginning, middle and end of
the conversation. That's what keeps Monti going, as the decades slip by,
his prime recedes ever further into history, and the specter of oblivion
closes in all around: How could he quit now, after all these years, with
the final breakthrough so tantalizingly close?
This time, however, Monti was in a state I'd never
seen before: subdued and contemplative. He said things were going fine,
as always, but his heart didn't seem to be in it. He seemed down, and I
got the sense that he'd been out of circulation for a little while,
maybe taking a break, perhaps even toying with the idea of hanging it up
once and for all.
But then Monti told me he's been discovered by a
young crew of filmmakers who are in the final stages of editing a Monti
Rock documentary. He says he sat in front of the camera reminiscing for
hours, a process of introspection and reflection that has refocused his
attention on some long-submerged emotional issues. "Getting rejected by
your parents and thrown out of the house as a kid - that's something
that's hard to get over," he told me in an uncharacteristically quiet
tone. "1 mean, life goes on, you move on and live your life, but that's
not the same thing as getting over it, you know what I mean?
"I've been spending a lot more time thinking about
Joey Montanez, instead of just Monti Rock all the time," he went on, as
though Joey were a friend he hadn't seen in decades. "It's been really
good for me, and it's actually inspired me. I'm working on a new one-man
show all about Joey and the journey he goes through. Sort of Noel Coward
on steroids - it's going to be great!"
