Jessica Harper, who had been in Hair for only two months, was an exquisite chick who said she's dropped out of Sarab Lawrence because it was a place for debutantes who'd taken LSD at their deb parties. She said she'd been embarrassed when her brother saw the show, because it still represented the scene in 1965. "The reason I do it is because it's really pathetic how many people there are who still think Hair is avant-garde and groovy and rceeeally contemporary," she said. She added, "The thing about Hair is that it really does bring people up to 1965. Eight hundred people a night are being brought forward into the past a little further."
We talked awhile. Jon spoke of his career. He said he'd been offered a part in Myra Breckenridge which he turned down. I was told that he'd played the queer in the green skirt standing beside Ratzo Rizzo in the opening bar scene of Midnight Cowboy. Jessica said she knew someone who didn't know that Jon was a man from his appearance in that role. "Really?" he said. "A lot of people think I'm a dyke. My wife thought I was a dyke when she first saw me."
The Nude for $1.50
After awhile, they prepared to leave. In parting, Jon said to me, "By the way, one thing you should print is that they only pay us $1.50 to do the nude thing, and I think it should be fifteen times that." I agreed, and went off to join another group.
Mary Davis had also been in the original Hair cast. I asked her about the disillusionment of other members.
"When I came to Hair, I came into it because it was a Broadway show. I didn't come into it because I wanted to teach love, and liberation and all that stuff, because I didn't know what the show was about. I learned what it was about after I got in, and that's what happened to most people in the beginning. Now people come into the show knowing what it's about.
I asked her if she believed in the play.
"I'd like to see what it's about happen, minus the drug thing," she said. "Freedom, love, liberation and all that stuff, I guess everybody wants that, but it doesn't happen. Hair is fantasy; it's what we'd like. Some people like Hello Dolly. That's their fantasy, Hair is fantasy, too."
A guy across the table tried to butt into the conversation, but his girlfriend, a Brooklyn nurse, kicked him in the shins, saying, "Shut up, Mark, don't you know when to shut up?" And he learned. George Tipton, another member of the tribe and a guy with the kind of open honesty you can never forget, began speaking in quiet earnest tones.
He spoke of a certain intimacy reflected in the play which would endure independently of its topical political significance. But George only asked questions. My answers provided the clues for which I'd been searching.
True the cast was in many cases disillusioned with the very thing that had made them all successful. Yes, Jonathan Kramer might have been correct that Hair spoke now about Tie City culture. But Hair's brilliance was something existential. It was the undifferentiated contact and movement and love which the tribes actions manifested. It was the nude scene in which the cast stands in frontal boldness, asserting the beauty of their bodies and the intangible intimacy they're supposed to feel amongst themselves. And it was the group-groping which was so taken for granted that one might gloss over it. It was the tattooed couple (two guys who seldom unlocked their arms, and were reputedly married). And it was interracial love. And it was the total dissolution of societal boundaries that disunite people, and keep them from friendship and hugging and kissing and loving. And it was Hair.