ITS EMBARRASSING TO see reporters playing along at the Tenacious ...
"Goddamnit," Black should reply, "isn't it obvious that's the big gag? The ambulance will come before the end of the show! Nice work, Abbott!"
Instead, the duo joins in stomping a stillborn joke into the ground. It occurs to me that media gadflies aren't what they used to be. I suddenly feel better about how I'm just killing time before having soup with Sylvia Miles.
Often dismissed as an overexposed New York icon, Sylvia is actually a rare specimen. She's a genuine eccentric, strolling into Cafe Un Deux Trois with a baseball cap spelling out "FAME," and large rings declaring "Sylvia" and "Super Star." Most actresses would be content with the two Oscar nominations. Good thing Sylvia didn't win, or she'd have accessorized them.
She's just returned from California, shooting another edition of the promotional New York Stories for DKNY. This provides an opening when I suggest that she might be more of a legend if she kept a lower profile.
"I know exactly what you mean. I'm in the DKNY New York Stories because I'm that kind of character, which reminds me of a story: In 1981, I guess, I did Evil Under the Sun. I was in the middle of my one-woman play, and I got the offer to play James Mason's wife. We shot in Mykonos, and I was hanging out with Diana Rigg, who at that point was going through a difficult period with the Scots lord she was married to and who she subsequently divorced. I found out through Gene & Francesca, the folk singers I know who still live on the West Side?they're ancient now, but they were huge in the 40s as folksinger/chanteuse kind of people?that the director Hal Prince had a house at?oh, it was on the side where Madame Sand had an affair with Chopin. They show this coffin of Chopin with his dick sticking up and everything?but Faye Emerson, I think, pointed out Hal Prince's house. So I walked to the door and I wrote, 'Dear Hal, stopped by to say hello, but you weren't home?Sylvia Miles.' And I thought, he's the kind of person who'll think, 'Jesus, she's everywhere.'"
Then Sylvia mentions that she's never had a press agent.
Any question prompts a story crammed full of fabulous figures and great gossip. Bring up her movie with the Hudson Brothers, and that gets Sylvia reminiscing about Peter Fonda, which leads to the making of The Hired Hand and how Steven Van Zandt spent his own money to throw a party for the film's rerelease, which gets back to that film she made with the Hudson Brothers.
"I had a lot of affairs," she adds, "and a lot of those men went on to run studios. Word gets back from L.A. on how to treat people. I was never really a gadfly. Half the time they said I was at Studio 54, I was out of town. Maybe that makes me the ultimate gadfly. I'm really an actor who lives in New York. I'm not?what's that expression? Bicoastal. I'm different in every movie. If I don't go out and see people, they wouldn't know what I look like."
Miles isn't kidding. She's repulsive as a lowlife mom in High Times' Potluck, currently screening weekends at midnight at the Starlight. Sylvia's a publicist's nightmare ("Did you hate the movie? We've all done better."), but she brings her own clippings. Pot Luck's also let Miles score a few awards at film festivals. She's proud of them, too, despite the occasional aftermath. "The one that I got at the New York Film and Video Festival," she says, "fell in the toilet that night. I gotta get another one."
Incidentally, I'm no brighter than a real journalist. I was thinking that soup with Sylvia would be a minor event, and sent my photographer to the premiere of Avril Lavigne's My World concert DVD at the Times Square AMC Theater. I actually leave Sylvia to rush over so I can breathlessly report that Avril's traded in her skate-punk look for a gothy heroin-addict pose. It's kind of nice, actually. But I can't tell you about Avril's favorite kiss ever, because then I'd be stealing a hot scoop from YM.
[jrt@nypress.com](mailto:jrt@nypress.com)