Original subtitles

Cookie and I were friends when she was in high school.

And we used to deal drugs together, we used to sell LSD.

And, um, that's how Cookie and I met.

Oh, I love Cookie. She was the most brilliant person I had ever met.

I loved her so much. I adored her.

I worshiped her.

Cookie and I were very close for a really long time, like old girlfriend sisters.

When she moved to New York, she really wanted to become famous.

That was her big goal in life.

She was uno famous-o.

That was it. And she did well.

And she got her books published.

She also had a drug problem and that kind of held her back a lot, but, um...

She was the funniest-- I would pee my pants laughing with her.

We put on stage performances and stuff in New York.

Sharon can really give you some stories about Cookie.

She made me-- We would sit around and just pee ourselves laughing at whatever.

We'd make these plays up, you know...

...and we would just adlib these plays, you know...

...and then we'd perform at the Poet Center and all this shit.

Sometimes they were really bizarre.

But we had the best time. Um...

Cookie and I and Mink lived together in Provincetown several summers.

Cookie and I were like bad girls together.

You know, kind of like Eddie Haskell and Eddie Haskell.

[ALL LAUGHING]

- John will tell you the same thing. MAN: Yeah.

We were bad girls together. We just...

We were so rebellious. That was it.

We wanted to see how rebellious we could be and get away with it.

In whatever way was rebellious at that time.

We were on black beauties and Old Crow or something, I don't know.

And we're hitchhiking in miniskirts up to here...

...black fingernail polish...

...and bourbon bottles and black beauties.

We were a mess. It was great.

Mm. And we got kidnapped by these hillbillies that tried to-

We got in the car with them because they had booze in the car. “Okay, we'll get in." Heh.

Then we realized that they were taking us, trying to get us lost.

We were going through these toll booths...

...and we realized that this is not the way we wanted to go.

S0 we started writing notes to hand to the, um...

...ticket-taker, you know, the...

“Help! Please help us!“

And trying to sneak it to the ticket-taker or the money, um--

MAN: What do you call it? Toll booth attendant?

Toll booth attendant. Thank you.

And, um, they'd catch us and rip it up. "Yeah!“

And we'd go...

And we were coming down off of speed. Right? You know how that is.

Or maybe you don't, but it's horrible.

It's very agitating. Agitative.

And these guys took Cookie off-- Mink and I jumped out of the car...

...tried to pull her out and the baggage, and they sped off.

We were left at this other hillbilly's house. I mean, real...

...Appalachia.

And we called the police...

...and Mink and I stayed at the police station...

...and they were looking out for Cookie through the woods.

She was hiding in the woods until morning.

They were drunk, passing out, looking for her. There were gonna rape her. Well, they--

I mean, they were so stupid and drunk...

...that she just hid underneath her bag.

I don't know how she got her bag out of her car--

MAN: Or some bush or something, or...

And then got a ride home from a-- What do you call it?

A ranger.

And-- Can you imagine?

S0 then, when we were at the police station, they were giving us a hard time...

...because I had a sketch book.

I was an artist, I had a sketch book with nude sketches in it.

And they were gonna confiscate it...

“What are you gonna do with that? Probably jerk off in the backroom with it."

And then they told us we have to leave town...

...but we can't hitchhike.

S0 we didn't know how to get out of town.

MAN: Didn't you have any money with you? -Mink had all the money.

Then we got to the air-- Somehow we hitchhiked.

We got to the airport.

We were gonna try to take a plane to Provincetown.

Because something was holding us back.

Some of the, you know, higher powers were holding us back from getting there.

And it was a holiday and there was all these naval guys at the...

And there was no planes. We had to spend two nights in the airport.

Before we finally got to Provincetown.

DERMODY: Cookie, I met in Provincetown because I was there...

...l moved in the early-'70s and it was great then.

I think David Lochary was living there in the winters. A lot of lunatics live there in the winter.

There was a girl named Black Beverly, who had taken too much acid...

...and walked backwards for a whole year because she had headaches...

...and walking backwards alleviated it.

And typical of Provincetown that nobody thought that was such an odd thing...

...that you saw her walking backwards. We crept up and looked in her window...

...she really walked backwards around the house, so it wasn't a gag.

But that was the typical kind of people that lived there.

And I met Cookie and we started becoming friends.

We went out to movies together. We started hanging out.

Cookie wasn't writing until she moved to New York.

She had started to. She showed me a few things.

I had been writing in Provincetown.

But she showed me a couple of her writing things and I thought they were great.

When she came to New York and got the job at Details...

.-.l think that was-- Was that her first job?

I think at Details Magazine.

And she would do "Ask Dr. Mueller," and an art column, which was hilarious.

My favorite thing that she ever did was went to-

She didn't go to one of the shows she was supposed to review...

...so she just wrote up that the painting was very bad...

...and found out that it was a sculptor.

S0 she called up my friend hysterical, “What am I gonna do?“

And he said, “Just write the next column and say:

'I just wanted to see if you were paying attention.“

And she covered her ass that way. It was quite funny.

But Cookie was a great character. And she--

Any time she walked out the door, her life was a story.

I mean, everything she did. Like, she would say:

“I'm gonna go to get the milk.“

And it would be, something lunatic would happen to her.

S0 her life was like that all the time.

She and Sharon, her girlfriend at the time, brought--

They had some money they had to bring to the bank...

...and they brought it and dropped it in a puddle and brought it home...

...and baked it in the oven to dry it off and set it on fire.

That kind of stuff happened all the time.

It was just-- I mean, she was a great character.

And every day was like that for her.

S0 thank God she put it down, because they were very funny stories.

She would tell us what would happen in the course of the day...

...and you would just think, “God, this is too good."

She just had adventures. Ha-ha-ha.

She would say, "I'm gonna dress down and go to Hyannis to pick up my welfare checks."

And I would see her on the highway in a monkey fur coat looking like Cookie Mueller.

I mean, she looked amazing.

And I thought, “She thinks that's normal."

I mean, she has no clue anymore what normal is.

She doesn't. She really doesn't.

She was really pretty unique.

She really quite was. She was great.

MAN: How old was she when you met?

I met her-- She was young. She had just had Max. Her child, Max.

And I remember going over to her house one day...

...and she was peeling potatoes, and Max was screaming, crying.

And I said, “What's going on?“

She said, "Well, potatoes are his friends.“

I thought, “Oh, my God!"

[LAUGHING]

So, I mean, it was just-... She had just Max, so she was pretty young.

I mean, she was young then.

But I guess we all were then.

In Provincetown, she was pretty sedate. She raised Max.

And, you know, it was really quiet there.

But when she got to New York, she became something else. She became--

And that was when she started to write too.

I think she became a real personality in her own right.

I think, in Provincetown, she was just, you know, just Cookie.

But when she got to New York, she became quite spectacular.

She was really known. People knew her everywhere.

I mean, she was sort of a local downtown celebrity.

And not just from John's movies, it was really her in her own right, kind of.

You know, I mean, just for being Cookie.

She was just a character. She was around to be a character.

And, uh, she was pretty- John-- You know, she had this lisp which I always loved, too.

And she was really full of spirits and really smart...

...and just a lot of laughs.

And strange things would happen to her.

Her and Sharon went on a vacation. She went to Italy a lot, Positano.

And they had rented a car.

And they had taken the car...

...and on the last day before they were supposed to return it...

...they had gotten stuck on a train crossing...

...and the gate fell on top of the roof...

...and crushed the roof.

S0 they got out and said, “Oh, my God! What are we gonna do?“

And they said, "Well, let's just return it. What are we gonna do?"

“Maybe they won't notice it."

Sharon goes to Cookie, “Sure, they won't notice...

...there's a crease on top of the car!"

[WITH LISP] “I don't know, maybe they won't notice it.“

[IN NORMAL VOICE] S0 they drive to the rental car place...

Ha-ah, typical Cookie story.

They drive, return this crushed car. The top is crushed. The roof.

And they return it.

And the guy checks the car out.

And lets them go. He doesn't see the crush- Why?

He was a dwarf.

There was a dwarf working at the rental car place.

And he was the guy checking the car out.

[LAUGHS]

It was one- Here's another story. Um...

Cookie liked to be out and about. She went to a lot of parties and stuff.

She crawled the fire escape to get into Studio 54, those kind of stories.

But one of my best ones was--

Best stories about her was-- In this kind of context- was...

...she was in Berlin and she didn't have enough money to pay the hotel bill.

S0 in order to avoid the hotel bill, she took an exit...

She packed her bags. She had a little bag or something in Berlin.

And she left the exit in back of the hotel.

And was trying to, like, get away from, you know, not be seen in the lobby.

S0 she was looking for a way out.

All these alleyways and stuff like that.

And she came to a wall, she climbed the wall.

She was starting to climb the wall and she realized, she got to the top...

...she was at the Berlin Wall, and she was headed in the wrong direction.

Headed into East Germany.

[CHUCKLING]

That was another Cookie story.

MAN: She wrote an essay about that. Yeah -Did she? Didn't read that one.

MAN: I think she was trying to get out of the laundry room, as well.

Yeah. True story. I mean, these are amazing stories.

And it all just happened to Cookie.

MAN: That must've been a tough death to take.

Oh, God. That poor child.

MAN: She died just shortly after her boyfriend died, right?

Mm-hm. Husband.

Vittorio.

Yes, it was horrible.

Because she was demented in the end and it lasted forever.

MAN: S0 was she not cognizant of people?

We don't know. She was not able to respond. That's all we knew.

She was paralyzed on one side of her body and I think blind in one eye and...

She was very vegetable-like and it was horrible to see that...

...a long time, she was a tough cookie. MAN: A year?

Yeah, more, maybe.

I noticed that she-- Her speech was going one year.

MAN: How do you mean, like slurred, or...?

Uh, different.

[DOG BARKING]

- More infantile. A little more infantile. MAN: Mm-hm.

And things that she wanted to talk about was, um...

...not like her usual high-powered self.

And, um, then she called me up and she wanted to spend a weekend with me...

...so I went out to spend a weekend with her and I noticed that she was--

She wasn't right. Her brains weren't right.

And then it went pretty quickly downhill after that.

Sharon took care of her a lot.

Sharon's a good person.

KOPER: I spoke to her a couple days before she died.

I talked to her 0n the phone.

Uh, and we were laughing again.

She visited us in California, her and Vittorio...

...when they had found out-- When they had gotten the diagnosis.

And, uh, you know, it was... S0 many people were gone.

A lot of people burned out off of those days.

I mean, you burned out or you stayed alive.

It was kind of a fast crazy crowd. Uh...

But that's the kind of people we were, really.