The Divine JT Sisterhood
by Steve Garbarino
Vanity Fair, Aug, 2003

The divas adore JT LeRoy, the 23-year-old literary sensation. Madonna sends him Kabbalah readings. Liv Tyler tells him everything. Winona Ryder, who wants to play LeRoy's charismatic, abusive mother in the screen adaptation of one of his books, cuddles with him. Exploring why this slight, androgynous survivor of a shockingly brutal childhood has become the confidant of Pink, Tatum O'Neal, Courtney Love, and other female stars, Steve Garbarino wonders whether LeRoy's celebrity fan club will make his career or break it.

To literary critics and his fellow writers, JT LeRoy has distinguished himself as a precocious talent able to mine golden prose from a white-trash childhood. But to a growing number of female celebrities, from Madonna to Winona, he has become so much more than just a writer to be admired. Since making his remarkable debut in 2000 with the autobiographical novel Sarah, the soft-spoken, androgynous 23-year-old author has assumed a number of roles for these famous women. He is their muse, E-mail pal, career adviser, marriage counselor, spiritual guru, occasional sleepover buddy, and the keeper of their most closely guarded secrets.

With each passing month, it seems, he adds a new member his girls-only tree fort. Winona Ryder, who met LeRoy back when he was a teenage street urchin, was the charter member. Joining her over the last several years have been singers Pink, Courtney Love, Debbie Harry, Shirley Manson, Suzanne Vega, Liz Phair, PJ Harvey, and Vanessa Carlton, as well as actresses Asia Argento, Tatum O'Neal, Diane Keaton, Susan Dey, Rosario Dawson, and Gaby Hoffman. One of his newest recruits is Liv Tyler.

For such women, who find themselves too often in the company of stalkers, sleazebags, and Hollywood sharks, the childlike LeRoy is the perfect friend. At five feet five and 130 pounds, he's physically unthreatening ; he's also unfailingly polite; and with his tragic past, which involved drugs, bouts of self-mutilation, and street hustling, he may even lend them an air of danger.

How do they love him ? Madonna sends him Kabbalah study materials and notes of encouragement for his latest project, a rock band called Thistle. Shirley Manson wrote a song about him, Cherry Lips. Phair had LeRoy write the liner notes for her latest release. Ryder is first in line to play his mother in a movie based on his 2001 book, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. Nearly all the actresses he knows have expressed an interest in playing his mother in the screen version of Sarah, to be directed by Steven Shainberg, who made Secretary.

In public, LeRoy maintains a Warhol-like mystique. He wears wigs, female apparel, and oversize sunglasses, and he seldom says a word. And yet he can give better phone than Warren Beatty, drawing powerful women into his world with his raspy, girlish drawl.

LeRoy's famous fans cannot be accused of having bad taste: there's no doubt that he's a gifted writer. In his work he brings together the southern gothic of Flannery O'Connor with the willies-inducing subject matter of William S. Burroughs. But his new friends may be drawn most of all to LeRoy's sensitive depiction of his troubled, abusive mother, Sarah, a truck-stop whore who serves as the antiheroine of his two books. LeRoy's fictional alter ego, the 12-year-old Cherry Vanilla, practically idolizes Sarah, even as she trusts him into a life of homelessness, drugs, and prostitution. In real life, LeRoy was seemingly destined to die young on the streets until a kindly therapist, Dr. Terrence Owens, intervened, persuading him to write his demons away.

Long before he started winning over singers and actresses, LeRoy successfully courted a number of established authors -- among them Michael Chabon, Jerry Stahl, Dennis Cooper, Mary Gaitskill, Mary Karr, Sharon Olds, and Tobias Wolff -- who helped him navigate a course to publication, some providing edits and advice along the way. "About eight years ago," says Wolff, "I received this thick packet of paper in the mail, about 40 pages scrawled in longhand. It was from this kid living on the streets. This therapist of his had read something of mine and told him to contact me. It piqued my curiosity. It wasn't finished literature, but it was incredibly promising. I told him to keep on writing."

At 15, LeRoy carried around a fax machine, plugging it into convenience-store jacks to send the authors personal notes and writing samples. It's now the stuff of coffeehouse legend.

Of his famous confidantes, only Ryder knew him in those days. "I was going through a breakup, a bad breakup," she says, referring to her split from Johnny Depp. "My ex and I were trying to work things out and trying to do nice things : go on vacations, the opera. And then we broke up. I had two tickets to the opera, and I was like, 'I don't want to go in alone.' And then I saw this kid standing near the doors to the opera house, and he was trying to listen in. He was a total ragamuffin. So I said, 'Hey, I have this extra ticket. Do you want to go see the opera ?' He was too young to be creepy. He said, 'Oh my God ! I really wanted to see this !' I think it was La Boh�me. And he says, 'Are you sure ? What about the way I'm dressed ?' He was a total sweetheart. I said, 'You're fine.'

"At the time, I was somewhat of a celebrity, and so we did get the once-over. But we went in, sat, and watched the opera. And he was crying throughout it. And I started crying for my own reasons, watching this beautiful kid so affected, someone his age grasping it. We went to this diner afterward and talked. I wanted to take care of him, have him move in, but he said he was heading back southÉ

"I fell in love with him. And I've been in love with him ever since -- not in that kind of way, because I can't look at him in a romantic way. It's like he's one of those guys you can lay in bed with and watch movies with and cuddle with and feel safe doing that. He is so true, such a poet, even in the way he speaks. I can't say I relate to his story -- I was lucky and had great parents, brothers, and sisters -- but I could relate to him, to his words, his visceral grasp. He's got something really special going on. He's not trying to woo you. It's just him. It's his heart."

The other women found themselves drawn to him through his books. They all echo a sentiment best expressed by an author LeRoy has been compared to, J.D. Salinger. "What really knocks me out," wrote Salinger, in the guise of his Catcher in the Rye protagonist, Holden Caulfield, "is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it."

Asia Argento, the sultry Italian actress who played the babe in the Vin Diesel action movie XXX, read Sarah on a movie set -- and soon met LeRoy through E-mail after his publisher put them in contact. Now they're like "two baby monkeys" whenever they're together, she says. "We sleep together, which for me is something very hard to do with most people -- apart from my daughter." Argento, who co-wrote the script for a possible movie version of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, adds that LeRoy's 'fragility' is what makes him alluring. "When something's very delicate, it's even stronger. People around it give it strength," she says. "JT forces you to listen to him even more, since he speaks so very low."

After reading Sarah, Shirley Manson was compelled to get in touch with LeRoy's agent, who sent her an advance copy of The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things. "I read it in one evening," she says. "To be frank, I thought it was a masterpiece." Soon they were corresponding via E-mail. "His voice came to me when I needed some companionship," Manson says. "I was in the Midwest making a record and I needed to talk to someone. It didn't matter if it was a boy or a girl -- just a human voice." In the music business, she adds, "we are constantly judged, marked, disapproved of. It's hard to find a confident. When you have a strong connection with JT, it feels like you are falling in love. It's intimate and then it is sexual in a funny way -- a benign way, I would rush to assure JT."

Sarah also worked its spell on Liv Tyler. "I wanted to contact him, write him a letter, but I thought everybody already knew him," Tyler says. "It was like he was too cool for school. Madonna and Shirley Manson had written him letters. Then it turned out that we had a mutual friend who asked if she could give him my E-mail."

She continues : "My secrets I can share with him. I trust him and feel safe with himÉ I tell him things I probably don't tell anybody else. He pours his heart out to me. So warm and understanding. And he's so polite."

Susan Dey speaks of him almost as a guru. "When he's speaking, everything is a meteor," she says, alluding to the LeRoy short story Meteors. "Everything is up there. There is a mystery about it. And you feel it in your core. And when it lands to the ground, it's like, ÔWhat is its use ? What is it for ?' You can study it. He lands it when he thinks it should and then it takes off again. He could give life to a doorknob."

Dey, who starred in two hit TV series, The Partridge Family and L.A. Law, wanted to meet him after being introduced to his writing by her 24-year-old daughter. "Initially," she says, "I had the desire to mother, to nurture him. But while I was reading Sarah, it became the opposite. It was he who had mothered me."

Dennis Cooper, whose disturbing 1994 novel, Try, inspired LeRoy to become a writer, has been looking on from a distance as these relationships have developed. "JT has a strong thing about mothers," Cooper says. "That's what going on. On the surface, it seems like a fag-hag thing, but I think he has a strong need for mothering, and vice versa."

Patti Sullivan, a screenwriter who has known LeRoy for many years, says "I've been on the phone with him where he can really read my feelings. He'll say ÔI had a feeling about you' and often it is right. It's an autism in a sense. Autistic people have a really high sense of telepathy."

The singer Pink has an E-mail relationship with LeRoy but has yet to meet him in person. "JT sees in color," she says, "and isn't afraid of it. I relate to him in that I extract my art through my personal pain, but he does it so much better."

You could feel the love for him at the Public Theater in New York during its recent "JT LeRoy and friends" evening. Ryder was the MC. Argento escorted the author onto the stage, as if he were too frail to make it on his own. Tatum O'Neal gave a passionate reading of his work, as did Rosario Dawson, Shirley Manson, Vanessa Carlton, and Gaby Hoffman. At the end of the night, LeRoy's roommates Speedie and Astor hit the stage with their band, Thistle, bashing out songs with lyrics by LeRoy.

Many of his disciples wore what said to be "raccoon penis bones" around their necks. Raccoon penis bones, it should be noted here, figure prominently in Sarah. The novel's young, cross-dressing hustlers wear them at truck stops to show that they're the finest of the "lot-lizards." LeRoy's fans can purchase these talismans on-line for $15. At the Public Theater, his fans wore them the way Shriners wear fezzes.

Hopping from one after-party to the next later in the evening, Ryder and Argento indulged in a kiss -- then Ryder planted one on LeRoy. A few days later, breathless in his excitement, he tells me, "Winona gave me a real nice kiss !"

JT LeRoy has fame and famous friends, but not fortune. Like rappers getting a taste of the good life, he and his alternative family live large whenever they can off the freebies provided for them on book and music tours.

The LeRoy family unit consists of the author and a couple that is "sort of" married, the aforementioned Speedie and her beau, Astor. With them, too, is Thor, the five-year-old son of Speedie and Astor. They reside together in a former squatters' enclave on Mission Street in San Francisco. Speedie and Astor like to joke that JT is their second child, adding that he's often more of a handful than Thor. "For one thing," Speedie says, "JT used to have a habit of darting in front of moving cars. He doesn't do that anymore, but does mutilate himself occasionally, seemingly not aware of what he's doing."

At times, apparently, LeRoy also hears voices. On the phone with me one night he suddenly yells, "You can't talk right now !" It's clear he isn't talking to me or to anymore outside of his own head. Astor takes the phone, saying apologetically, "He's in freak-out mode."

During the recent stop in Manhattan, the LeRoy gang stayed at the chic Soho Grand. Argento paid for the room, and Italian designer Costume National dressed them, even allowing them to keep some of the clothes. Director Shainberg threw them a party at his Fifth Avenue loft. Index magazine -- the host of the Public Theater event -- filled goody bags with advertiser's products and saw to it that their names would appear on nightclub "in" lists. Motorola, a sponsor of the reading, gave LeRoy a cell phone.

Given their familiarity with life on the streets, LeRoy, Speedie, and Astor resembled a scavenging pack of Ratso Rizzos, swiping hotels towels, toilet-paper rolls, and morsels of room service left outside other occupants doors. "If it ain't nailed down, were taking it," LeRoy says.

Two arguments have emerged in the LeRoy camp concerning his recent celebrity smooching. One sees it as positive and harmless: he reaches out to people he respects, and they to him. The other view is more skeptical, taking into consideration how his friendships with Hollywood divas might affect his work, not to mention how it will be perceived.

"The truth is that a lot of celebrities want to co-opt on his cool, his edge, so they can say ÔI hang around with him, I know him'" says Sullivan. "His genius comes from enormous damage. Even though he has all these celebrity friends, he is still in touch with the boy that he is."

Cooper, his mentor, sounds less sanguine : "The question is, What is he going to write about in the future ? He can't keep talking on the phone to Tatum O'Neal and Shirley MansonÉ Writing is difficult. He doesn't like being alone and he has so many fans."

"He needs to focus," says Sullivan. "He just need to get of the fucking phone!"

Ryder is impatient with the argument that LeRoy is somehow cutting himself off from his truck-stop roots. "Since I was 13, I've been making movies," she says. "So I was around people whose names are known. But whenever I mentioned one of them, I would get shit for name-dropping. Like I had to hang on to that indie street cred, which is bullshit. If you do something that somehow touches people, it's going to attract people toward your work and you may end up becoming friends with them."

"JT is shockingly manipulative and absolutely pure at the same time," says Courtney Love.

It should be noted that LeRoy doesn't take his fame all that seriously. He even planted a false story about himself in a tabloid : a recent item in the New York Post's "Page Six" column, which reported that Argento was going to have LeRoy's love child.

"He called me one day and said he had knocked up Asia," recalls "Page Six" reporter Chris Wilson. "I said, 'Are you shitting me ? I thought you were into dudes.' He assured me that he had indeed impregnated this gorgeous Italian starlet and said they were in love. Then he called back with Asia on the line. She swore it was true."

Explains LeRoy, "Asia and I had just finished the script to The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, and I said to her, ÔI knocked you up and you're carrying my seed.'" LeRoy says the idea of her being pregnant was meant "figuratively".

"It's interesting to me that he has this carefully cultivated image of the literary shut-in, the fragile recluse who's far too sensitive to face the world," Wilson says. "The reality is that he's very media-savvy and an aggressive self-promoter. Sometimes I think he has more in common with Lizzie Grubman than J.D. Salinger. But more power to him. The literary world could use more characters like him."

"He's the networker of all networkers," says Cooper.

LeRoy thinks he knows why he has gone down this path : "I have a gaping hole that all the attention in the world will never fill. I totally crave attention -- and it scares the shit out of me." At one point, he says, he even had sex with a reporter from a major newspaper who was writing a profile of him.

LeRoy's best defense against charges of celebrity hobnobbing is his own existence. That he survived an abusive childhood is a miracle. That he has managed to maintain any vestige of kindness, creativity, or humanity is reason enough to cut him some slack.

"I was five or six when I first started having sex with a guy," he says one evening at two A.M. "I didn't understand what was wrong with it until I had my own kid." He is referring to Thor, whom he serves as a second father.

It wasn't those who sought his services who posed the biggest threat to his life, he says, but his own mother. "She would aim to fucking kill you," he says. "My mother would black out and she would do stuff. And I continued what she started." LeRoy, who used to hold a steam iron to his skin, continues : "To me, the most attention I got was when I was getting hit. It felt good. For a while, if you touched me, it felt like a stab or a shock. But if you hit me, it felt good. Now I can stand to be touched."

For all the pain she caused him, his mother did leave him with at least one survival skill: charisma. "My mom was the most charismatic person ever. I watched her talk herself out of every situation. On the street, you have to. I had a pimp once. He gave me money I had to give to somebody, and I went out and bought candy and toys with it that I couldn't return. I got two fingers broken for it, but that's better than getting my brains blown out."

He says his attraction to Courtney, Madonna, Winona, et al. Has nothing to do with glamour. "I have a drive to create a family and community. I want to interconnect people. It's like a spider, building a web. I need to know there is a net. That to me is what it is about." His celebrity friends have formed that web, he says. "It's not ego-driven shit. These are strong personalities. They're not into it because it's cool."

In hindsight, he says, he did learn one thing from this days as a hustler that he can apply to life with his newfound friends: there's little difference, he says, between the relationship of pimp to whore and that of publicist to actress. He recalls an episode when a friend's publicist instructed him to go through her whenever he wanted to speak to his friend. "Basically, it's like, 'You have to go through the pimp before you can talk to the bitch'," he says.

Writing remains his savior - which brings him back to the women who love him. "When I found out Madonna was reading my stuff," he says, "it gave me a few hours to run really fast. I was like, 'She's in my world? Wow!' " But the euphoria didn't last. "Writing is the only thing that makes me calm - the weird combination of insanity and productivity," he says.

LeRoy's next novel, scheduled for 2004, will be his first one put out by a major publisher, Viking. With that book, readers will have an idea of whether or not a life among the divas has left this truck-stop bard too far from the experiences that first inspired him.

"If he focuses and has good work habits, he'll have a lot of great things to write about in the future," says Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for his 2001 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. But he finds LeRoy's new status as a celebrity pal a little worrisome. "It ought to pale to writing in its appeal," Chabon says. "Ultimately, it's really not that interesting. I truly hope he avoids the Truman Capote Highway."