Pretty Mess

1

EVE HARRINGTON FROM THE START

I made my stage debut at the age of five. I was in the St. John the Baptist Kindergarten production of Mrs. Jingle B. It was a Christmas pageant with singing that sounded more like screaming in unison. The dancing looked like a bunch of drunk bunny rabbits trying to find their way home after a bender.

I don’t exactly remember the plot of the show. I was cast as an elf, essentially relegating me to the chorus. After the first few days of rehearsal, I realized that the girl who was cast in the lead—as Mrs. Jingle B herself—was not doing a very good job.

I was very confident. I walked up to my teacher and said, I can do a better job than her. The teacher agreed. In front of the entire kindergarten class and all of their parents, I took my star turn wearing a quilted plaid jumper, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, and black mary janes. I might have had my hair cut short like a boy’s, but I was an Eve Harrington right from the start.

My mother, Renee, taught piano out of our house to make extra money. She is an excellent musician, but I never wanted to be one of her students. When we sat at the piano, she didn’t have nearly as much patience with me as she did with her other students. I used to swat her away so I could practice on my own. This would always lead to fights between us. Eventually, when I was still very young, I lost interest in piano altogether. It was one of my ways of rebelling. Instead of learning her instrument of choice, I would let her accompany me while I sang songs and did little dance routines for our friends and family. I would become dizzy on the applause, bowing vigorously for the small crowd.

From the time I was three, before performing I would shut myself in the closet at my grandmother’s house. I wouldn’t come out until I’d been properly introduced. Then I’d walk into the room, hop up on the coffee table, and sing songs for the family. Mostly I did rhymes or things I had heard on my favorite TV shows, like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Sesame Street, or Romper Room. I would not allow Renee to accompany me on the piano. These were a capella productions.

I don’t know where I was getting this from, but I always wanted to be a showgirl. I imagined costumes, big stages, colored lights, an announcer calling my name, and walking out there and putting on a show for the people. I wanted the full production, like an MGM musical with a moving staircase. Some people are dying to sing and some people want to dance, but my goal was always to put on a show.

One day when I was about three, my mother and I went to go visit her friend Anne. She lived in downtown Atlanta and would sometimes babysit me. Anne’s neighbor, a woman who owned the Cheryl Neal and Associates talent agency, saw me playing by myself in the front yard.

Is this your little girl? she asked Renee. (I always call my mother Renee because I often saw her more as a peer.)

Yes.

She is just really cute and entertaining as hell, she said. I own a talent agency. I want you to bring her in and we can see what we can do for her.

She gave my mother her card. Shortly thereafter, we went to her office and signed with her as my agent. She would send me out to castings for local commercials or TV shows that needed a cute, blond little girl. This was not the Atlanta of today, where there are hundreds of shows being produced. Everything I was going out for was very small potatoes.

Renee or my grandmother would drive me around to the auditions. As a small child, I always had a fun time, even if I didn’t get the gig. I booked some of the jobs, but of course I didn’t get most of them. I remember doing some local commercials and a bit of modeling.

Later, in high school, I filmed a public service announcement in which I played a girl sitting on her bed listening to her boom box. I would love to be a rock star. I’d be famous, I said. But some of them use drugs. And that scares me! This was my brain on cheesy PSAs; any questions?

When I worked, my mother would get the check, and she and my grandmother would put it into a savings account. Later, when I was a bit older, we would use the money I made to pay for my dance classes, singing lessons, and costumes. Even as a tiny tot, I was already putting my money right back into the business, a tactic I still employ.

I loved going on auditions back then, because it was like putting on shows. Even when I was just at home, I was always bouncing around the house, pretending I was performing. Renee knew she needed to do something to get all of this energy and creativity out of me, so I wouldn’t drive her crazy. She enrolled me in ballet and tap at Art Linkletter Studio.

I still remember my first tap number, which was to a song called Mississippi Mud. I wore a gold and black leotard with bows on it. My hat looked like a pie plate. The teacher told us that we all had to spray silver paint on our tap shoes for our costume. I won the Personality Award at the recital. I don’t know if I had a good or bad personality, but I sure had a lot of it.

I loved being in dance class so much that Renee started putting me in children’s theater. I joined both the Children’s Civic Theater, which did seasonal theater productions, and the Atlanta Workshop Players, which would do monthly cabaret shows. Those were a combination of song, dance, variety, comedy, sketches, and everything else they could dream up for us kids. My grandmother was an excellent seamstress and would sometimes make my costumes for period pieces. I still have some of them.

The Children’s Civic Theater would stage its shows at the Peachtree Theater, which is now a nightclub called Opera. These days, when I hit the club in Atlanta, I can see the spot where I stood on stage during all those productions.

As I got a bit older, I started to take performing even more seriously. I took voice lessons as well as dance classes. I changed to Fleetwood Studios and joined their travel team, which would compete against other studios. We weren’t the best, we weren’t the worst, but we were very dedicated.

I had a friend named Kim who was in the Atlanta Workshop Players with me, and she danced at Fleetwood Studios as well. We would perform duets together in the company. Eventually, in high school, she left to go study ballet with some incredible Russian teacher and our paths split.

In the meantime, we would go to performance-based summer camp. We’d spend a week in a cabin in northern Georgia out in the woods working on a number or two. At the end of the week, everyone’s parents would come pick them up and we’d give a recital. It was kind of like Dirty Dancing minus the dramatic lift in the final scene—no Patrick Swayzes here!

At around ten, I was part of a pilot called The River Ratz Club. It was a scripted kids’ show with songs and music. It was in the same vein as Kids Incorporated, the show where Fergie got her start. Our kids were a bit more country. We were hanging around with animals and stuff like that. We only made one episode, and it never went anywhere, but my mother still kept the folder from when I did it. She gave it to me recently, along with a box of other mementos. It’s thirty years later, but if they want to go to series, I still have the original script! Thanks, Renee, for sacrificing your basement all those years.

A lot of little girls like to dance and perform, but for me it was slightly different. I didn’t have brothers and sisters, and my mom was single for most of my childhood. My grandmother helped out a lot, but it was also important that I had somewhere to go. I think that’s the biggest gift my family gave me, through my mom’s divorces and the other tumultuousness of my childhood. I always had something to enjoy in my life, and that was the performing arts.

I met my friends through performing. I was also exposed to the LGBTQ community, people who were different from me. The thing about the arts and being around creative people is that there is less discrimination over color, race, sexual orientation, or creed. It’s just about talent. People only cared if you had it or not. If you were the best dancer, you got the part. It didn’t matter what color your skin was, or how much money your family had, or whether you were raised by a single mother.

At my elementary school in Lilburn, Georgia, I would always perform in the talent show. In fourth grade, I sang Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5. I wore a purple satin jumper with silver sequins that my grandmother made for me. My blond hair was swept back in Farrah Fawcett wings, with a big lavender feather sticking out. It was somewhat redneck, but also totally adorable. This was the first of many manifestations of my love affair with Dolly Parton.

By the time I entered sixth grade, Renee had appointed herself my creative director. She has always been what I would call a square. Her taste is much more toward the classics and I was always oriented toward pop culture. I wanted to sing something that was on the radio, but Renee forced me to do My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music in my fifth-grade talent show. My grandmother made me a beautiful smocked dress for the occasion. But even a good outfit can’t save a boring number.

When I was a child, my mother married my stepfather twice. The first time was when I was three and the second time was when I was eight. They divorced for the second and final time when I was twelve. Soon before their second divorce, my mother and stepfather took a trip to Vegas. They saw a show at the Stardust called Le Lido de Paris and I later found the program. (I would eventually film my very first video as Erika Jayne on that same stage at the Stardust.) It featured these beautiful women with glittering, barely there costumes and huge feather headdresses. Oh my God, I thought, this is what I want to be doing. I never wanted to sing like Julie Andrews, but I absolutely wanted to be out there with a big costume wowing the crowd.

Although we lived in the conservative South, no one in my family ever blanched at stage nudity. I think it’s because my mother and grandmother were both artists. They recognized those women were professionals plying a craft. Staying that fit and performing in those costumes every night was a difficult job.

When I was in eighth grade, I went to go see Madonna’s Virgin tour when it came to Atlanta. That really changed my life. Because they had an extra ticket, I was able to go with my friend Kim from dance class and her older sister Julie.

I thought, This woman is marrying elements of musical theater with pop music. Look at these cool costumes and these songs. That’s when I realized this was my lane. I didn’t want to do My Favorite Things. I wanted to be like Madonna.

As much fun as I was having with the kids in dance class and community theater, I wasn’t really loving life at the Catholic school my mother and stepfather sent me to. My classmates thought I was stuck up and arrogant because I would go off to do plays, commercials, and dance recitals. All the other kids were really into sports, and they didn’t understand what I was into. We were twelve years old, so they made fun of anything that made me stand out from the pack—and they chose this.

Of course I wanted to be accepted, but this is the age where kids begin pulling away from each other. You can start to see what kind of adults they are going to become. I realized that the kids at Catholic school would never be part of my tribe. Most of them were headed down a much more traditional path toward conventional careers. That never held any appeal for me, so I veered a different way.

When it came time to attend high school, Renee and I moved out of my grandparents’ house in Decatur, Georgia. We had moved there when my stepfather left for the second and final time, because it had broken my mother financially. Once she got her life back together, she bought a condo in Atlanta, and we came roaring back to the city.

This meant I could attend Northside High School, a public school that had a magnet program for the performing arts. Thank God she had split from my stepfather. If she hadn’t, I probably would have been forced to go to a Catholic high school, which wouldn’t have been good for me. To get into Northside’s magnet program, I had to audition. I don’t remember what song I sang, but it was good enough to get me into the Musical Theater Department. I’m thankful for that.

Just like every other high school kid, I had to take algebra, English literature, chemistry, biology, and the rest of it. But then two hours of my day were spent working in the Musical Theater Department.

Some kids came for art, drama, dance, or other disciplines. The Theater Tech Department (where I met my first boyfriend, Jonathan) created all the lighting and sets for our productions. The school’s orchestra would perform for our musicals.

Starting my sophomore year, I was also in the school’s tour show. Every year, we would put on a review and perform around the world. About thirty kids traveled, chaperoned by Mr. Densmore, the head of the Musical Theater Department. He was in his fifties, tall, with a bald head surrounded by a horseshoe of gray curls. He looked exactly like how you’d imagine a high school music teacher. He was great at his job, taking the kids seriously and cultivating their talent. Mr. Densmore was always working to bring more visibility and cachet to our program. He was hard on me, but to be fair he was hard on all of us. He certainly didn’t have an easy job. Dealing with thirty unruly high school kids is hard enough, but add to it all of these creative kids with their egos and insecurities. Hopefully, Mr. Densmore had a lifetime supply of Xanax to get him through those trips.

Kids in the arts grow up fast. There’s a certain level of maturity that comes from having to be responsible for being at rehearsal on time, learning all your lines, taking care of your costume, doing your own hair and makeup, not missing the call time, and doing a good job on stage. Anyone who didn’t do all those things wouldn’t last very long.

Don’t get me wrong—especially in the later years in Europe, we were sneaking out at night to hit up the clubs and drink. It was legal at eighteen there, and we were all having a great time. We socialized like adults, trying to act more mature than we actually were. For all intents and purposes, we were adults. Adults with no bills, which is the best kind to be.

Every spring break, all of the arts kids would travel to a different city in Europe, while all of our other schoolmates were being rednecks at Panama City Beach in Florida. We would go to different churches in Brussels, London, Paris, or Vienna. The orchestra would play and all of the musical students would sing Latin mass. Tour show would also play theater dates for the local audiences. We got to travel and see the world while working on our craft, which is far better than wasting our spring break sitting on the sofa watching The Price Is Right.

Each year, the tour show had a different theme. One year it was a salute to Broadway, another year it was pop hits, things like that. We did both standards from the songbook and contemporary hits from the eighties. My junior year was a banner one, because I got to reprise my role as Dolly Parton singing 9 to 5. That same year, I was also cast as Madonna, and did Into the Groove. I wore black patent leather booties, black lace tights under a black skirt, and a black Betsey Johnson top that was shaped almost like an inverted triangle. I wore a black lace bow in my hair, and of course black lace gloves. You can’t do early Madonna realness without black lace gloves. I thought I was so cool, I was practically on that Virgin tour.

Most people in the show got a solo number, but it was a ninety-minute performance, with about fifteen numbers. So when you weren’t in the spotlight, you were singing and dancing backup for someone else or backstage getting into another costume for the next number. Everyone wanted to be in every number and to be out on that stage as much as possible. (Thirty years later and it’s just like some of those Real Housewives fighting for camera time.)

Travis Payne, who would play a pivotal role later in my life, was one of my good friends in tour show. All of my friends at Northside High School were in the arts programs there; the normal kids in our algebra and economics classes weren’t part of our circle.

Occasionally, tour show would make additional trips abroad. When Atlanta was wooing the Olympic host committee to hold the Summer Games there, we flew to Tokyo to represent our city. Throughout the school year, we would perform all around the Atlanta region.

Coca-Cola, which is headquartered in Atlanta, sponsored our school, so we got to do some really cool stuff thanks to that affiliation. In 1987, for the celebration of Atlanta’s 150th birthday celebration, the company put on a huge performance at the Coliseum (which is now Philips Arena). It told the history of the brand through song and dance. Yes, it sounds like a cheesy half-time show, but it was really spectacular. They laid out a lot of dough for this thing with sets, costumes, and lights. They also hired Michael Peters, who had choreographed Michael Jackson’s iconic Thriller and Beat It videos, to do the choreography.

Peters brought in dancers from Los Angeles to be the featured performers, but they took the best from the dance and musical theater departments at Northside High to back them up. We had all been in shows before, obviously, but this was the first time any of us were seeing a real production with a big bankroll behind it. At the time, working with Michael fucking Peters was just about the coolest thing a dance kid could imagine.

In addition to having a touring show that performed at home and abroad, we would also regularly stage musicals locally. We performed them at the Woodruff Arts Center, a huge complex in Atlanta. I was a natural as Val in A Chorus Line, and I still remember all the words from her signature song, Tits and Ass. (It was very on brand for Erika Jayne, even before she existed.)

By the time my senior year rolled around, I was over high school theater. I had already decided that I was moving to New York to start my career and