John Waters says that by the time he was in high school, he had “already written things that caused trouble.” As a summer camp counselor-in-training, he wrote a short story that had “lots of gore,” about a killer at a family reunion, and read passages to the kids every night. “The parents complained!” he says. A Baltimore native, Waters started making films with his Dreamland crew—a group of locals and childhood friends that included Harris Glenn Milstead (better known as Divine), Mink Stole, Edith Massey, and Pat Moran—in the 1960s. Since his first movie, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, he’s gleefully challenged the idea of good taste: His characters literally eat shit and get raped by lobsters. At 78, Waters is producing work—which now includes a novel, nonfiction, live shows, and photography—that’s as delightfully perverse as ever. He’s still ending nights at Club Charles, the seedy Baltimore bar he’s frequented for decades. “It’s the coolest place to go to, no matter what kind of person you want to meet,” he says. “As long as they’re not normal.”
Waters in his parents’ kitchen in 1961, at age 15.
Patricia Waters, courtesy of John Waters
Waters grew up in Lutherville, Maryland, a small suburb of Baltimore. He attended a Catholic high school that “discouraged every interest I ever had.” While he always wanted to be a writer, “I didn’t read a lot when I was young because we had to read these horrible books about Benjamin Franklin. I wanted to read Hot Rod and books about juvenile delinquents.” Around age 16, he started hanging out in downtown Baltimore to “meet the beatniks and the gay people. The police would stop us and say, ‘You can’t do this. This isn’t Greenwich Village.’ ”
In 1966, Waters was kicked out of New York University during a marijuana bust. He moved back to his parents’ house and, later that year, shot his second short film, Roman Candles. The experimental movie, which marked Milstead’s film debut as Divine, collaged disparate scenes, from drag queens on motorcycles to a priest drinking beer. Waters posed for pictures outside his parents’ home (above) before the film’s premiere at a Baltimore church. “It was all the downtown bohemia, the crazy hippies, lunatics, and gay people,” he says. Afterward, “I’m sure we went somewhere and smoked pot, because that’s what we all did then.”
Waters debuted his signature mustache while making Multiple Maniacs (1970), his second feature film. Sique Stole, the elder sister of Mink, told Waters to “put a little pencil on it.” Every single day since, he’s used a Maybelline black velvet eye and brow pencil to fill it in. “I want a Maybelline ad! I don’t know why they won’t hire me.”
The 1975 premiere of Female Trouble, in which Divine plays a teen mom turned roving criminal, was held at “an uptown art cinema—a failing one.” Despite the severe blizzard that hit New York that day, the premiere was crowded. The film’s distributor “gave us a limo there, but not home!”
For the 1981 Baltimore premiere of Polyester (above), Waters’s parents joined him and Divine.
Unknown photographer, courtesy of John Waters
For the 1981 premiere of Polyester (above), Waters’s parents joined him and Divine. While his previous films were rated X or NC-17, Polyester “was R-rated, so they could take a sigh of relief.” At the premiere, “every photographer wanted a shot of them with the most shocking-looking people because my parents looked kind of like George and Barbara Bush.”
John Waters, Debbie Harry and Bill Murray.
© Chris Stein/Rednight, Inc.
When Waters visited Manhattan in the 1970s and ’80s, he frequented clubs and bars like Max’s Kansas City, Pyramid, CBGB, and Area. Through that scene, he became friends with Debbie Harry. For Polyester—which stars Divine as a housewife and Tab Hunter as her lover—Waters enlisted Harry, her Blondie bandmate Chris Stein, and composer Michael Kamen to write three original songs. Harry and Stein persuaded Bill Murray, whom Waters had never met, to sing one. “He does it seriously, like a bad Douglas Sirk film track, which is why it’s funny.”
In 1988, Waters released Hairspray, a musical comedy starring Divine, Ricki Lake, Sonny Bono, and Debbie Harry that became a mainstream hit and his only PG-rated film. The Baltimore premiere (above), held at the Senator Theater, “was one of the happiest nights of my life,” says Waters. “You could tell it was going to be a giant hit. It was a magical night right before everything just exploded badly.” A week after Hairspray opened, Divine died suddenly of a heart attack, at 42. “We had just toured the whole country doing press. Every news show had me and Divine laughing, and then they cut to me carrying his coffin.”
William S. Burroughs and John Waters
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William S. Burroughs “was very important in my life. He’s the one who called me the Pope of Trash.” Between 1974 and 1982, Burroughs lived in “the bunker,” a former YMCA locker room on the Lower East Side. When Waters visited, “he had a single cot and was reading a paperback version of Guyana Massacre. He served us warm vodka in peanut butter jars and passed a joint.”
John Waters and Edith Massey
Unknown photographer, courtesy of John Waters
“I never went to Studio 54. I hated it because I hate disco. I was a punk,” says Waters. One of his favorite places in Manhattan was the Mudd Club, which was “hardcore.” Edith Massey, cult-famous for her performance as “the Egg Lady” in Pink Flamingos, and pictured above with Waters in the club, “was a terrible drunk—she got mean. I was always a nice drunk.” Her pirate garb was her “trying to be trendy.”
Keith Haring and John Waters
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At Hairspray’s New York premiere, Waters signed autographs for a mass of fans that included Keith Haring (above, wearing glasses). “To be honest, I didn’t know that was Keith,” says Waters. “I knew his work, but I don’t think it registered that he was him. He was just with other fans when we got out of the limo to sign stuff.”
John Waters, Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder
Kevin Mazur/WireImage
Cry-Baby was Waters’s perverse take on a ’50s teen rom-com, starring Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder, at the Baltimore premiere. The film was shot in Baltimore, where “they leave you alone—there’s no paparazzi.” Waters and the actors often hung out at Club Charles. “The cast was so crazy that when people would see them coming, they would run. They wouldn’t ask for an autograph. They were scared!”
John Waters and Patty Hearst at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in 2001.
Kevin Winter/Getty Images
Before Waters met Patty Hearst—a granddaughter of William Randolph Hearst who was kidnapped in 1974 by the Symbionese Liberation Army, then arrested for participating in several crimes with the group—he had attended her trial. In 1988, Waters was seated next to her at a dinner celebrating Paul Schrader’s movie about her; two years later, he cast Hearst in Cry-Baby, her first turn as an actor. “She did it to say fuck you to being a kidnapping victim,” says Waters. “People come to me to change their image. She’s still a very good friend of mine. She even came to my mom’s funeral.”
John Waters, Traci Lords, and Mink Stole in 1997.
Con Keyes/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
In 1986, Traci Lords, then America’s most famous porn star, was embroiled in an industry-rattling FBI raid that revealed she was a minor. “None of those things happen to somebody at that age because of something good,” says Waters. “I thought I could rescue her from that.” Waters cast her in his 1990 movie, Cry-Baby, and they became friends. Above, Waters is pictured with Lords, and Mink Stole—“my oldest friend in the world, whom I still see all the time”—at a 25th-anniversary screening of Pink Flamingos, in 1997.
Pedro Almodóvar, John Waters, and Jim Jarmusch
Catherine McGann/Getty Images
Like Waters, Pedro Almodóvar and Jim Jarmusch saw their breakthrough movies released in the 1980s. “We didn’t compete in any way. All of our films are very different,” says Waters. “We all respected each other’s lunacy.” They are pictured here at the New York premiere of Cry-Baby, held at the M.K., an Art Deco dinner club in Manhattan.
John Waters with Jeanne Moreau
Eric Robert/Sygma/Sygma via Getty Images
In 1995, Waters was a juror at the 48th Cannes Film Festival. When you’re a juror, “they give you French legionnaire escorts everywhere!” Jeanne Moreau, the French actor and singer, was that year’s jury president. “She didn’t suffer fools. She liked to do the screenings at 8 in the morning. I’m a morning person too.” In 2004, Waters took Moreau to the Paris premiere of A Dirty Shame, his comedy about sex addicts, starring Johnny Knoxille, Selma Blair, and Tracey Ullman. “I was nervous, and I said we had a lot of censorship problems. She said, ‘Why, darling? It was poetry.’ No one had ever called what I did poetry!”
Iggy Pop, and Ricki Lake with Waters at the Cannes Film Festival.
Patrick Kovarik and Jacques Demarthon/AFP
Cry-Baby which featured Iggy Pop and Ricki Lake was shown at the Cannes Film Festival. “On premiere night, you have to wear black tie or they won’t let you in. Iggy certainly ignored that rule.” Cannes is Waters’s “favorite film festival in the world.” They’ve screened most of his movies, except, he notes, Pecker (1998). “They said it wasn’t weird enough. I don’t know why—it does have talking virgin mothers and tea-bagging.”
Waters with Debi Mazar, Henry Kissinger, and Todd Solondz.
Unknown photographer, courtesy of John Waters
“Now, there’s an odd little group,” Water says of this photo with Debi Mazar, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and filmmaker Todd Solondz taken at Tina Brown’s Talk magazine launch party on New York’s Liberty Island in 1999. “But isn’t that what a good party is—when you meet people you’d never meet? This is the only time I met Kissinger. We certainly weren’t debating foreign policy. I didn’t call him a war criminal. I think we were just talking about, ‘How are we supposed to get back to the boat? There are no lights!’ ”
In September 2023, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened “John Waters: Pope of Trash,” a 12-room, nearly yearlong exhibition devoted to Waters’s work. The retrospective included his 50 years of ephemera, from handwritten scripts to a “Pink Phlegm-ingo” barf bag and Divine’s birth certificate. “I’m still astonished. That’s the height—it’s not going to get better,” says Waters. “The main thing you think is, Thank god I’m alive. You usually get this when you’re dead.”
In the fall of 2023, Waters received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “I’m holding a photo of my parents because they would have been so proud,” he says. (His father passed away in 2008, and his mother in 2014.) “It’s right in front of Larry Edmunds Bookshop, one of the first movie bookshops I went to in my life. And I’m right next to Roy Rogers!” Online, “someone quipped, ‘He’ll be closer to the gutter than ever,’ which I thought was so great.” After the ceremony, he took his siblings, nieces, and nephews to dinner at the Chateau Marmont.
Waters with Jean Paul Gaultier at the designer’s Henri Bendel party in 1992.
Ron Galella, Ltd./Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images
“I just love the fashion world. I find it so extreme and so snotty, in the best possible way,” says Waters, who walked the runway for a Comme des Garçons show circa 1992. (“That was scary!”) “I like to see the craziness and the insanity of it, especially the clothes no one would ever wear on the street.”
In 2011, Waters attended a Museum of Modern Art event honoring Pedro Almodóvar. “MoMA always has good parties.” That night, he met both Karl Lagerfeld and Rossy de Palma for the first time. Lagerfeld was the uncredited assistant costumer for Boom!, “my favorite bad Elizabeth Taylor movie. I loved talking to him about that,” says Waters. “He was down-to-earth— totally nice and funny.” De Palma, the Spanish actor and Almodóvar’s longtime muse, “was like a Dreamland girl. She was similar to Mink and the people who worked with me.”