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Since December 2003 This site is an official Asia Argento website. However, I'm not Asia Argento herself. Do not send fanmail because Asia won't receive it. I am not receiving any financial gain from the website. No copyright infringement intended. Special thanks goes out to my three special collaborators and contributors: Audrey (from France), Beatrice (from Italy) and Stef.
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Asia Argento & JT Leroy - Autumn/Winter 2002Text: Chris Campion In a short space of time actress-director Asia Argento and shy literary wunderkind JT Leroy have formed an unorthodox union, both symbiotic and symbolic. Proof positive that opposites attract. “It reminds me of a movie,”Asia says of their fateful meeting, “one about a girl who’s a boy and a boy who’s a girl. And, when they fall in love with each other, it’s perfect because they are like two halves of one whole and together they make the perfect being.” Not a regular screen romance then, but certainly a story arc that could have been plucked from the plot of a Hollywood movie. Or even a fairy tale. She is Hansel to his Gretel, and they venture into the woods together, hand in hand, each immunised from danger by the presence of the other. “He gives me hope for the human species,” says Asia, “that there is the possibility of a creature who can go through hell and come back better. I haven’t seen anything crooked in him. Everything about him is clear and light and noble. “I’m attracted to JT, the way I would be attracted to another girl,” she confides. “It’s a very sensual thing. The feminine energy within him is so much stronger than the male.” When the young author talks about Asia, he too seems to be attracted by precisely what he is not. “She has a power over her world and seems to be so in control. She blows me away,” he gushes in a voice so frail that words seem to crumble as soon they leave his mouth. Asia contacted JT after reading his debut novel, Sarah. They struck up an email correspondence last year but did not meet in person until this June. Their first meeting occurred in an appropriately artificial environment: a small, manicured garden set behind a hotel in the centre of Rome. Dressed in black, in defiance of the unremitting midday heat, Asia waited expectantly for a figure to emerge from within. The sun beat down upon the plastic trees, and smoke curled up into the air from a cigarette held between her long, elegant fingers. “I was smoking like crazy,” begins her fevered recollection of that morning. “My heart was racing, my palms were sweating. I was waiting and waiting,” she continues. “Then he came downstairs. We shook hands. From then on, I felt very comfortable with him. An instant empathy.” JT, who was also wrapped in black, eyes shielded by large mirror shades that dwarfed his small, delicately featured face, remembers: “I was so nervous to meet her. She was so beautiful, I could only look at her feet.” A black, felt fedora, from beneath which tumbles out the tresses of an ill-cut honey blonde wig, tops off the bizarre garb that JT has adopted to protect his identity in public. Paradoxically, it’s a look that attracts as much (if not more) attention as it deflects, accentuating the writer’s androgynous physique. “When he takes off the glasses, the wig and the whole masquerade,” says Asia, “it’s like there’s a different person underneath. He is very sexual, very in tune with his body. But at the same time he makes sure you keep your distance. Only when he opens the door, are you allowed in.” Seldom known to leave the sanctity of his San Francisco bolthole, this baby-faced Garbo of the literary world was on a month-long European book tour, his first ever foray outside the US, that also took him to Stockholm, Paris and London. Despite the anxiety of unfamiliar surroundings and the panic inspired by book-store meet and greets with his adoring fans, JT was taking it all in his stride. “I think I’m going to go into such culture shock when I get back,” he chatters. His first stop, Rome, was the setting for Letterature, a month-long literary festival at which both he and Asia were scheduled to read. The night following their first meeting, under clouds heavy with rainfall, an audience of 3,000 Romans gathered in front of the crumbling facade of the Basilica di Massenzio, spotlit to a golden glow. “They didn’t tell me how many people were going to be there,” says a surprised JT Leroy, renowned as he is for sending celebrity surrogates (including the likes of Deborah Harry, Dennis Cooper and Sandra Bernhard) to read for him in public. He has previously done only one reading by himself, which took place in the US. “But I couldn’t finish it,” he admits, “because I puked.” The audience’s reaction was unexpected to say the least. “They all applauded. They thought it was part of a performance, but I felt really humiliated.” This time, JT puked before he took the stage, allowing him to sufficiently compose himself to recite “Harold’s End” (a short story originally written for Dave Eggers’ literary periodical McSweeney’s) from beginning to end without a hitch. Then, after tacking a whispered “grazie” on to the final sentence, he dashed from the stage like a startled critter running for cover. Ironically, the story that Asia picked to read, “Disappearances” – from JT’s second book, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things, a collection of connected episodes from his childhood – is about the discomfort of strangers. When asked to comment on the roots of their rapport, the pair are almost lost for words. “That’s deep territory,” says Asia. “Territory that belongs to the subconscious. And maybe, for that reason, it is something that can not be spoken about.” The key though lies in their unconventional childhoods, which provide much of the emotional impetus for their work. “I started writing out of the way an oyster creates a pearl,” JT explains, “out of irritation, out of survival.” His debut novel, Sarah, is a heavily fictionalised memorial to the transient (and oft-times traumatic) life he spent on the road with his mother. A harrowing fairy tale told with wide-eyed innocence about a teenage boy who remakes himself in the image of his absent mother as a “lot lizard” (Southern parlance for a truck-stop whore) and is kidnapped by a rapacious pimp called Le Loup. Something within this tale touched the actress; possibly, she recognised elements of herself. Scarlet Diva (1999), the semi-autobiographical film that Asia wrote, directed and starred in, mines similar territory. It relates the story of Anna Batista, a brassy Italian actress locked into a relationship largely built on fantasy with a remote rock star. Determined to reinvent herself as a director, she braves the advances of lascivious producers and rabid groupies. Asia has described the film, which was produced by her father (Dario Argento) and her uncle (Claudio Argento), as “a documentary fiction about a young woman with infantile behaviour in search of love in a loveless world”. A lonely and melancholic child, she says, “My imagination was my enter-tainment.” Work commitments meant that her parents were often away. Her father, Italian horror maestro Dario Argento, would periodically move out of the family house in Rome and live in hotels so that he could write scripts without distraction. Making movies on location would take him away still more. At age nine, Asia took up acting in the vain hope that her father would take notice and cast her in his films, something that did not happen until, at 16, she took the lead in Trauma, playing a severely disturbed, anorexic teen who witnesses her parents’ murder. Asia’s mother, actress Daria Nicolodi (who appeared in many of Dario’s films) also had a busy work schedule, so she was raised by a succession of nannies and her elder sisters, Anna and Fiore (children from her parents’ previous marriages), and nurtured by her imagination. Growing up in Rome, with its rich vein of ancient and religious history spilling out of museums into the streets, there was an ample amount of visual material to stimulate her. “I was surrounded by all these religious paintings; saints going up in flames and blood gushing. They frightened and fascinated me. I was moved by the aesthetics, because the meanings were so distant.” At home, she says, “my mother would feed me with a lot of controversial books.”
“She was reading Lolita at eight!” interjects JT. “I would watch whatever I could too,” says JT, “but I only really got to watch movies when we were on the road. I’d sneak into a movie theatre and watch the same film over and over, all day.”
“What were your favourite movies, JT?” asks Asia. “Freaks. That’s still my favourite movie. Gone with the Wind. I liked my father’s movies too, especially Suspiria,” says Asia, citing his caco-phonous 1977 film about a dance school in Freiberg that is covertly run by a coven of witches. “I was scared, but I knew how to deal with the fear. So it was a healthy feeling for me. I was lucky that I had the chance to watch it. To me it was like a fairy tale.” Fairy tales also worked their magic on JT, informing the events of his life. “I spent most of my time alone with books,” he says. “Somehow I got my hands on Grimm’s Fairy Tales when I was about six. But my grandfather only had classical literature: the Bible, Dickens and Homer.” JT’s favourite book, The Odyssey, seemed to speak to him about life on the road. Between the ages of four and 13, JT was a rootless child, denied the affection and attention afforded by a stable family home, and trapped in a cycle that saw him shunted endlessly between foster care, life on the road with his mother, Sarah, and (when separated from her) time spent living with his maternal grandparents.
His grandfather, a prominent West Virginian preacher and a strict discipli-narian, ran his house by the crack of a switch and to the letter of the law laid down by the Bible. While living there, JT underwent intense religious training (“The tortures of hell were painted vividly to me,” he says) and was sent out carrying a soapbox and a handful of tracts to proselytise on street corners.
The everyday rites and superstitions of Appalachian culture that he experienced first hand fused with biblical stories of supernatural beings and miracles that had been already drummed into him. “As a kid you just accept what’s thrown to you. You don’t think, this is incongruent to the Bible. It’s all magical thinking.” Beliefs were not the only pliable thing in JT’s childhood world. Gender too was something fluid and subject to change. “If we were going into some new town,” he explains, “it would just be better if we went in like two girls.” His mother would dress him up as a little girl while on the road and instruct him that, if anyone were to ask, they were sisters. “If I was a girl,” he says, “I got treated a lot better.”
For her part, Asia claims that, “as a child, I always felt like a boy.” Her vampish screen persona came about much later. “It was something I had to develop,” she explains, “I invented this feminine persona when I was about 22, changing my body and even the way that I walk, because I felt that it was required of me for the movies.” In JT’s company, her nurturing instinct emerges and they chit chat with a sibling intimacy. “Sometimes I would make friends, but because we were on the road, I would always have to leave them. But then I always, kind of,” he falters, seeming hesitant to continue. “I don’t know. I always messed it up. I never kept friends for very long. With the kids around my grandparents house, it was every man for his own. Nobody acted like my friend. If they told me to shut up, I did. I was really quiet.” “So you don’t have any friends from your childhood?” “Oh, no,” JT says, “Do you?” “I have one. She was actually the only friend that I had. And I was so jealous of her. If she had any other friends I would die and tell her I wouldn’t talk to her until Christmas.” “Why Christmas?”
“Because it was a special date and always seemed a long way off. She’s still my friend. Angelica.” “Yes, but not really. We had so much freedom that we were little vandals. I didn’t like to be around other kids. I was embarrassed for them. I didn’t do the things that people think kids normally do. I didn’t go on the slides.” “But we’re going to go on a slide,” JT assures her. “I had a dream about it. You had to pay, but I was going to take you to a free one.” “We had to pay to have fun!” Asia says, with mock surprise. “Yeah. It was set up by some creep.” “And he was getting the money?”
“Yeah, while clinging onto the ladder.” |
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