My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them

Karen Black (1939): Diva of the Deranged

143 Karen Black Diva of the Deranged Michael Schiavi Is Karen Black a diva? Well, she plays one in Nashville (1975): B-list country-and-western star Connie White. Buried under miles of blonde wig and a sequined orange organza gown that defies all description, Connie ascends the stage at Opryland to sing—if that’s the word—such showstoppers as “Memphis” and “Rolling Stone” (both of which La Black herself composed). Peering at her, political hack Michael Murphy comments, “The last time I saw a dress like that, I was headed to the junior prom. Girl fell out of the car halfway to the dance.” 144 That was my first image of Karen Black, as seen in the basement of American University’s Bender Library in March 1988. I was a closeted freshman unearthing as much VHS Altman as I could. Along the way, I accidentally discovered what an underground New York band would later label “The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black.” Almost beautiful, almost brilliant, almost human—Black should have been a gay icon to rival Tallulah. I’ve never quite understood how she missed that distinction. But I’m happy to take up my brothers’ slack. In her forty-year film career, the only time Black has ever played a remotely anchored character was in Francis Ford Coppola ’s You’re a Big Boy Now (1966). She’s lovesick Amy Partlett, the saccharine goody-two-shoes forever mooning after library assistant Peter Kastner, who has eyes only for evil go-go cage-dancer Elizabeth Hartman. Kastner is completely oblivious to Amy’s earnest cross-eyed passes, and who can blame him? Black gives the part a shot but looks uncomfortable in Amy’s demure little dresses and teenybopper tops. You keep waiting for her to shove Hartman outta that cage and relieve her of the spangled miniskirts and Julie Christie–esque white eye shadow that caught Kastner’s eye in the first place. When will Karen become the ’70s sex beast we all know her to be and secretly long to be ourselves? Luckily, she didn’t make us wait long. In Five Easy Pieces (1970), Black takes on Rayette Dipesto, Jack Nicholson’s neglected dim-bulb girlfriend. When not straining the bodice seams of her orange polyester waitress uniform—whose lower hem misses public indecency by a quarter inch—Rayette favors rabbit-skin coats and chain-bedecked dress creations that one sees only during Sunday brunch at Phyllis Diller’s. Rayette also has a Tammy Wynette fetish that allows Black to warble (and damned sweetly at that) “When There’s a Fire in Your Heart” to the indifferent Jack. Are you starting to get the Early Black Leitmotif ? Straight boys repeatedly overlook KB’s freaky charms; discriminating gay boys can’t look enough, even when we’re not quite sure why we’re Karen Black 145 so compelled to ogle this odd woman with the tonsorial avalanche poised atop her head. Oscar-hounds will surely know that Five Easy Pieces netted Black her only nomination to date, for Best Supporting Actress— but do they also know that, in one of Hollywood’s most delicious ironies, KB lost the Oscar to Helen Hayes in Airport, the kickoff film to a franchise that Black would soon make her very own? Airport ’75 (1974) tosses together Helen Reddy (as a singing nun), Linda Blair (as a transplant patient), and Gloria Swanson (as herself), seated across the aisle from Nancy Olson, Glo’s young rival from Sunset Boulevard (1950). This quartet is enough to blowtorch anyone’s queer pilot light, but then onto the craft strolls Miss Black as head stewardess Nancy Pryor, consort of skirt-chasing pilot Charlton Heston. Welcome to Gay Paradise; may I offer you a crazed cocktail? It’s only a matter of time, of course, before our heroine ends up piloting the plane, a task for which her vision problems would seem to disqualify her, but if she didn’t try, you’d never get to see her thrust her tongue eight inches beyond her head while trying to pull a relief pilot (dangling from a passing helicopter, mind you) through the cockpit’s shattered window. A move like that could only send Karen spiraling into the mutant roles that defined her reputation in the 1970s and established her as Diva of the Deranged. Enough ink has already been spilled on...