The horror, the horror show! (Books).

Stone, Martha E.

The Ghastly One:

The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan

Jimmy McDonough

A Cappella Books-Chicago Review Press. 376 pages, $26.95

RARELY have life and art mirrored each other as closely as in the case of horror-meister Andy Milligan. This is a remarkably well-written biography of a chilling man who reveled in identifying and exploiting the physical and emotional weaknesses of the actors he cast in his low-budget films, which were destined to play in the sleaziest firetrap theaters of decaying downtowns. He was racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and violent--and gay, though he would never have used the word to describe himself.

Author Jimmy McDonough, a contributor to a number of publications (the best known of which are Variety and The Village Voice) became a close friend of Milligan in his last decade, and spent countless hours interviewing him as well as the people who had worked with him. Milligan bequeathed all his extant films, screenplays, and scripts to McDonough, who says that his obsession with Milligan began in the early 1980's when he was a contributor to a 'zine that reviewed exploitation movies.

The Ghastly One, whose title derives from a 1968 Milligan film, is told chronologically and includes interviews with Milligan's sister, his half-brother, and his step-sister. One might guess from his films that Milligan came from a seriously dysfunctional family; actually, he grew up in a living house of horrors, which he replicated in film after film. McDonough lets Milligan's family members and colleagues speak for themselves, without any pop psychologizing.

Milligan was born in Minnesota in 1929, joined the Navy during World War II, and was discharged for homosexuality, a charge that he always denied. He began his professional career as a puppeteer, later acting on radio and early TV. As a sideline, he intermittently owned and operated dress shops. His rise to fame began in 1960, about two years after the coffeehouse Gaffe Cino opened on Gornelia Street in Greenwich Village. Milligan's dress shop was just around the corner, and the Cino crowd was impressed with his dressmaking skills. "From this tiny coffeehouse," says McDonough, "sprang the entire off-Broadway scene, not to mention such playwrights as Lanford Wilson, Tom Eyen, and John Guare." Playwright Robert Patrick, whose 1994 novel Temple Slave is based on Caffe Cino, is quoted as saying, "You didn't talk a lot about outside lives. At the Cino, that wasn't real."

Milligan went on to direct about nine productions at the Cino, none of them original works but all of which were noteworthy for their sadistic content. The Warhol crowd frequented the Cino, but Milligan had no use for them, regarding them as undisciplined, sloppy, chronically late, untalented as actors, and concluding that "the Warhol people ruined Cino." By 1965, the Cino had gone up in flames, and within two years its founder Joe Cino had died. Many Caffe-goers began to frequent Warhol's Factory. In 1965 Milligan made his first film, originally shown at experimental film houses and later released as a sexploitation short. Vapors took its name from "Our Lady of the Vapors," as the St. Mark's Baths were known, and it was a landmark film at that time. The script was written by Hope Stansbury, who sounds worthy of a biography of her own.

In 1968, Milligan married one of his leading ladies. She had just had a fight with her boyfriend, but he gave her away at the wedding, which was held on the set of one of Milligan's horror movies, Seeds. The wedding was actually covered by Women's Wear Daily! Milligan spent the wedding night at a gay bar. His bride took her honeymoon later, sailing to Europe alone on an ocean liner. The marriage did not last. Milligan was, in the words of McDonough, "a nightcrawler, always on the prowl for anonymous sex ... scurrying everywhere from 42nd Street moviehouses" and meat-packing district bars to trailers on the West Side Highway, as well as "sex theaters in the 14th Street area." It was at a 14th Street theater that Milligan made a return to the stage, directing a series called "Plays for the Discriminating Homophile." By the late 1970's he had bought a derelict theater in Times Square. Milligan was artistic director and lived in the building--despite minimal renovations, a firetrap without heat or hot water--and staged hundreds of shows there for seven years.

Near the end of his life, Milligan moved to Hollywood, where he made a few more horror movies, but there was no market for them and his expenses were higher than expected. His boyfriend was a low-life hustler who died of AIDS, which Milligan had also contracted and to which he eventually succumbed in 1991.

Lavishly illustrated with black-and-white stills and advertisements for Milligan's plays and movies, the book also includes a complete filmography and bibliography. The Ghastly One is a labor of love that deserves notice, not only for its retelling of Milligan's life, but also for its evenhanded and well-researched treatment of the lost world of horror and sexploitation movies.