To continue our celebration of Little Richard’s birthday week, here’s some more goodies (and from Sunday, click here for a 42-song mixtape celebrating some hits, misses, and wonders for his wild career).
Some years back, an editor at the Oxford American contacted me. “Little Richard is supposedly living in a penthouse suite at the Hilton in downtown Nashville,” he told me. “I can get you his cell phone number. Do you want this?”
I did.
I was told to ask for Mr. Penniman when I called. I would have to let it ring indefinitely and try numerous times, I was advised, but eventually he would pick up. To my astonishment, he picked up the very first time.
He was very sweet, and he called me “baby,” and he continued to do so for the very brief conversations that followed. But he did not want to be interviewed, a topic on which he never budged.
Our original plan was to get Little Richard telling stories. Our new plan—well, we didn’t have one. But I think it worked out. You can read my 2015 story and decide for yourself.
When I first turned in my draft, my editor was happy with the work. But, he informed me: “We do want to tone down the orgies.”
So, right. My first draft had a lot of orgies.
Because for Little Richard, his untamable and unplaceable sexuality was the electric wire running through those manic swings between the sacred and the profane. Just as he collapsed the difference between a Soviet satellite and a sign from God, so too did the ecstatic expression of the infinite seem to overlap with the more mundane matter of getting his “titties eaten.” And it felt almost tedious to try to explain this facet of his strangeness, to unearth the alien quality in him that resisted categorization by race or gender or sexuality or anything (no surprise that Richard once named Michael Jackson as someone he’d like to see play him in a movie).1
So I elected to, ahem, show, rather than tell on this front.
But my editor thought the orgies just overwhelmed the piece. This was absolutely the right decision. And I will even pause to give a belated thanks to the editor, one of my all-time favorite people to work with. He had a kind of gentle wisdom, like guiding a toy boat in a tub, you wound up at your destination like quiet magic. I mention all this because it can be hard to believe that the person taking a red pen through the wonderful orgies of Little Richard is the hero of the story, but he is.
Be that as it may! It still does feel like a part of the tale, not just salacious footnotes, but juice right at the heart of the squeeze. It didn’t fit in my article, but it belongs as a bonus track, as addendum, as a little whip cream.
So here, from the cutting room floor, are the raunchy bits from my first draft (including a crucial mention of the one-and-only Lee Angel, someone I’d like to write a full profile on some day; we didn’t find a way to fit her in after this got removed, which was a mild bummer).
The reporting here is not particularly original, just curating some highlights (among many, many examples) in the Charles White biography and the “Southbank Show” documentary. Enjoy!
Charles White’s 1984 biography The Life and Times of Little Richard, an oral history in which Richard himself does most of the talking, must be among the most entertaining pieces of American history ever written. In no small part, this is because Richard is so candid about sex (or, as some have suggested, has such a vivid imagination; pity the fact checkers on the topic of Little Richard).
In White’s book, and on “Southbank Show,” the British television documentary on Little Richard that came out the following year, Richard talks (and talks) about voyeuristic adventures in automobiles landing him in jail; about masturbating seven or eight times a times a day; about spying on men urinating in bus station restrooms (“like I always did”). There are plenty of memorable appendages: a painful encounter with a “boy with fifteen inches”; a Clarksville, Tennessee drag queen named Bobby who would walk by the dressing room of the Queen City Rainbow club “leading his boyfriend by the penis, which was just like a rope.”
And orgies. Lots of orgies. Asked on “Southbank” about a prominent DJ, Richard responds: “I remember, we had this beautiful orgy going, it was a fantastic orgy—one of the best ones I’ve been to. And in the middle of this orgy—that was fantastic—somebody knocked on my door. I said, ‘oooh just a minute, an orgy!’” (The DJ he was asked about was the guy knocking, not someone in the orgy, but this was apparently the memory that the name brought to mind).
Another: “Me and a young lady one night was having a big orgy. We got naked. Me, the young lady, and three other fellers. We took off our clothes. We smoked this angel dust. We was crawling about on the floor like dogs, naked. We got dusty from the angel dust.”
The most famous of these escapades took place in the dressing room at the Paramount Threatre, where, according to Richard, Buddy Holly walked in on him and the stripper Lee Angel: “I was jacking off with Angel sucking my titty. … Well, she was doing that to me and Buddy took out his thing. He was ready, so she opened up her legs and he put it in her. He was having sex with Angel, I was jacking off, and Angel was sucking me, when they introduced his name on stage! He was trying to rush so he could run on stage. He made it, too.”
Lee Angel was Richard’s some-time main squeeze and in his telling, his partner in organizing orgies (and served as a lure to bring in handsome men to the party).
“I think I was the woman that Little Richard had always wanted to be,” Angel told White. Mostly, she said, Richard liked to watch. That’s a theme that comes up a lot from Richard himself: “It was a big thrill to me. … As I was watching, I would masturbate while someone was eating my titties. They should have called me ‘Richard the Watcher.’”
Richard has often described himself as gay. Others in his life, and sometimes Richard himself, have said otherwise. During his stints as an evangelist, he sometimes preached against homosexuality, which he described as “unnatural,” “contagious,” “from Hell,” and worse; later, he said, “Jesus loved gays. He died for gays too.”
Gay, straight, or something else entirely—let’s just say that Little Richard contained multitudes. “Sex to me was like a smorgasbord, you should just go and pick whatever you want,” he said on “Southbank.”
“I would get up off an orgy and go pick up my Bible,” he said. “Sometimes I would have the Bible right by me.”
Off and on throughout his life, Richard was clearly torn between his life as a Christian and his life as a rock & roll sinner. During one spell as an evangelist he stated flatly that “this kind of music is demonic.” In a sermon, he said, “I want you to know, don’t you forget, that the Devil himself was a master musician.” He means it as a warning, but it sounds like the start of a pretty good song.
“You got one foot in the church and you got one in sin,” he preached at one point. “You’re trying to have God and the Devil.”
And I thought of what he said on another topic: Just go and pick whatever you want.
Elvis, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Prince, Michael Jackson—you might call them white guys wanting to be black, black guys wanting to be white, boys wanting to be girls, etc. But they were neither and both. The way-out dementos, the aliens, Little Richard’s disciples all.