Cookie Mueller
Dear Cookie Mueller,
Hey Cookie, where to begin? Shall we point people to your quotes? Tell them about the wild things you’ve done? Tell them that, however crazy your life looks on paper, your words were always those of a sane woman who knew her strength and beauty in this world and wasn’t afraid to shine? Yes. We’ll just leave it there…
RIP Cookie Mueller.
And that’s not Rest In Peace. That’s Rest in Party.
respectfully, Mookychick xxx
Best Known For:
F*cking a chicken for the sake of art in a John Waters film that co-starred Divine eating dogshit. Not many people know about Cookie Mueller, but those who do know her from her work in John Waters films and for her amazing book Ask Dr Mueller which is hilarious and talks about the wonderful, weird and traumatic events of her life – like sleeping with Hendrix, getting raped, and indeed f*cking a chicken – with wisdom, humour and detachment.
( We’re really scared this entry’s going to come up a lot in google for anyone who types ‘f*cking a chicken’. Well, f*ck it. Not the chicken, obviously. Maybe we should give them tips on how to do it? … Nah. Mooky Eds xxx )
Least Known For:
Nearly giving up her lifestyle as a New York Art Whore to marry a farmer and rear babies on a horsehair mattress. She was going to do this, but came to her senses after 4 months of living on the farm.
Mooky Factor:
If ever there was a goddess walking amongst us on this earth, Cookie Mueller was it… RIP Cookie Mueller. If only we could have known her…
Best Cookie Mueller Quotes:
“Somehow I got the name Cookie before I could walk. It didn’t matter to me, they could call me whatever they wanted.”
“I accidentally burned a friend’s house to the ground once.”
Cookie Mueller was “a writer, a mother, an outlaw, a fashion designer, a go-go dancer, a witch-doctor, an art-hag and above all, a goddess.” (John Waters)
“Any time she walked out the door, her life was a story. I mean, everything she did. I mean, she’d say ‘I’m going to go get the milk’ and something lunatic would happen to her. So her life was like that all the time.” (Dennis Dermody)
“We were bad girls together. [One time] we’re hitchhiking in mini-skirts up to here, black fingernail polish, bourbon bottles and black beauties. We were a mess. It was great…” (Susan Lowe)
“She has no clue any more what normal is.” (Dennis Dermody)
Read some excerpts from Cookie Mueller’s writing:
Alien (from Ask Dr Mueller )
Pink Flamingos (from Ask Dr Mueller )
Links:
Is Cookie Mueller a true icon? Have your say on the mooky poll and messageboard
Cookie Mueller’s background:
Cookie Mueller born in Baltimore but when she became a teenager she ran away to join the hippies on Haight-Ashbury in San Fransisco (where she slept with Hendrix, organised psychedelic parties and got raped). Cookie Mueller wanted the most she could get out of life, and pursued pleasure and life’s meaning with equal dedication.
Moving to Greenwich Village, Cookie became a known face in the art scene. She knew all the faces (like the doomed Studio 54 model Edie Segewick) but she also wrote fresh and funny sex and health advice for various zines.
Film-maker John Waters recognised Cookie’s star talent so he made her a ‘family’ member of his ‘Dreamlander’ team of actors who would appear again and again in his films. She shone in films like Multiple Maniacs with her incredible energy. She always played wild girls, some of them even named Cookie, blurring the lines between fact and fiction. No-one who’s seen it can forget her bad girl in Female Trouble growling “I’ve got a knife in my pocketbook and I’m gonna cut you up after class”.
Most famously, in Pink Flamingos Cookie had to do terrible things to a chicken, namely stuff one up inside herself. We don’t know who to feel more sorry for, Cookie or the chicken, but even though she mistreated that poor chicken she herself was never anything less than positive when she was mistreated by life.
Most people agree that even though Cookie was a talented Dreamland actress and party girl she shone most brightly as a writer. Ask Dr Mueller is a collection of pieces about her life. From constantly running away to her most famous scene in a John Waters film, from accidently burning down a friend’s house – and an employer’s boat – to being attacked with her ‘slutty’ girlfriends by country yokels who tried to molest them but their dinkles were too small, Cookie writes with hilarity but also great wisdom about her unusual existence and the lessons she has learned.
She also wrote the lesser-known Walking through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black, and it’s worth picking up anything she has written, ever.
Cookie Mueller died of AIDS in 1989, seven weeks after her Italian cartoonist husband – yes, she did get married after all her adventures – died of the same. Her ashes were scattered on a church flowerbed in Greenwich Village, a beach in Provincetown, beside her husband Vittorio and her dog Beauty, in the Scarpati family crypt in Sorrento, Italy, and in the sacred waters of the river Ganges in India. Even if death she has remained generous and free-spirited.
Cookie proved to us by her work, and by the tributes of her friends, that she could live more in a month than most people do in a lifetime.