A new documentary captures Mother Cavellucci’s life as the ‘First Lady of New Hope.’
By: Susan Van Dongen
The look on the sergeant’s face must have been priceless. After all, when Sarge says "Pick up that gear, private," he doesn’t expect the new recruit to turn around and say, "What? Are you kidding?"
But then again, the average World War II NCO rarely saw the likes of Joseph Cavellucci, better known in his later years as Mother Cavellucci, the "First Lady of New Hope" and the "oldest living drag queen in captivity."
"Somehow the Army got a hold of him," says Tim McMurtry, a New Hope-based filmmaker who recently completed a documentary on Mother Cavellucci. "They tried to get him to pick up his duffel bag and he just said ‘no.’ The story goes that he said something like ‘Don’t you have other people to do that?’ Cavellucci was royalty wherever he went. The Army didn’t know what to do with him, so they made him a clerk."
Mr. McMurtry and other New Hope residents are amazed that Cavellooch as his friends and "children" called him got accepted into the armed forces at all. "She told me she went to the draft board in drag, in the ’40s, thinking they wouldn’t take her," says Stefi Moore, an interviewee from Mr. McMurtry’s documentary, I Remember Mother. "She was Klinger before there was a Klinger."
"Apparently he achieved the rank of sergeant and was honorably discharged," Mr. McMurtry says. "It’s all at his gravesite."
In fact, when Mother Cavellucci died in May 2000, he had a full military funeral. The flag was draped over his coffin, folded and presented to his next of kin most likely one of his 653 "adopted children" from the gay community. Cavellucci’s South Philadelphia family of origin had turned their backs on him decades before.
Co-created by associate producer Don Mueller, I Remember Mother is the first documentary independently written, shot and produced for FIN Pictures, Mr. McMurtry’s digital-video production company. The hour-long video combines home movie clips from Mother’s gala "weddings" and other fetes, behind-the-scenes footage of Mother’s last birthday bash and interviews with a handful of Mother’s friends, gay and straight.
The film has been shown at venues in New Hope and Lambertville, N.J., and Mr. McMurtry has entered it in numerous film festivals, including the 10th Annual Philadelphia Festival of World Cinema, coming up April 4-18. (As of this printing, a screening date has not been set.)
Although Mother Cavellucci was most definitely a man he used to say he was born with his mother’s features and his father’s fixtures he referred to himself with a feminine pronoun. However, in conversation and on the film, Mr. McMurtry, interviewees and friends go back and forth between "he" and "she," sometimes in a single sentence.
"Mother was a survivor," says Mr. McMurtry. "He never suppressed who he was. It took amazing courage to be a gay male growing up in the 1930s and ’40s, and to be so totally out. He performed in drag revues 50 years ago, at a time when it was dangerous even illegal to do drag."
"She was out when George Washington crossed the Delaware," says Michael Gardner, one of several drag performers and New Hope residents interviewed in the film. "She was waving from the shores, as we like to say."
A native of Tampa, Fla., with a longtime interest in filmmaking, Mr. McMurtry had seen his share of colorful characters. But he had never seen anything like Mother Cavellucci.
"It was like ‘who is THAT?’" he says, recalling his first sighting of the silver-bouffanted grande dame. "I saw her sitting at the bar with this crowd of people around her. Then I noticed she was sitting under a caricature of herself, so I thought she must be known around here, and that was her seat at the bar. I kept seeing her around town and hearing tales, and I knew there had to be a great story here."
Mr. McMurtry got the really deep dish from his roommate, who ran a coffee shop just below Mother’s Bridge Street apartment.
"Mother would come down every morning and tell these stories to my roommate and her sister," he says. "I got to hear a little bit more about her personal life and learned about her history."
Born in 1925, Joseph Cavellucci was raised in South Philadelphia, attended a Roman Catholic parochial school and served as an altar boy. Rejected by his family, he left home at 17, got drafted and eventually rose to the rank of sergeant in the Army. He considered himself a lifelong devout Catholic, often attending Mass in full drag, unnoticed by all except the most observant.
"Sometimes the false eyelashes gave him away," one interviewee says. "He loved church. If he couldn’t go to church, he would watch it on TV."
How Sgt. Joe became Mother is recounted in the documentary’s breezy mixture of heartfelt recollections and outrageously funny stories. One of the local legends has Mother forgetting the name of her "groom" during one of her many weddings. Another has to do with a set of dentures, misplaced somewhere in Lambertville. Then there’s the one about worried friends taking Mother to the hospital after a mild attack, causing bewilderment at the admissions desk. Amid the confusion, Mother grabs the hand of one of the physicians, looks up from her wheelchair and says, "Doctor, am I pregnant?"
"She did that to make everyone laugh, to make everyone feel better," Mr. McMurtry says. "She didn’t want anyone to worry."
Although she was mostly pleasant, charming and kind-hearted, Mother could also be the quintessential Italian grandmother who didn’t mince words if she didn’t like your boyfriend. And she’d really let you have it if you promised to come visit her and then didn’t show.
In addition to the Philadelphia event, Mr. McMurtry has entered I Remember Mother in gay and lesbian film festivals in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto, New York and Philadelphia. It’s FIN Picture’s first completely independent documentary.
Mr. McMurtry has a degree in film and mass communications from the University of South Florida in Tampa. He has more than 15 years of varied corporate and broadcast production experience, and moved to New Hope about seven years ago to launch a career in documentary filmmaking. Originally trained as a videographer, Mr. McMurtry now does the writing, producing, editing and post-production work on his films, in addition to actual shooting.
"I’m hoping we can do more documentaries at FIN, and I have a few subjects in mind," Mr. McMurtry says. "I’m also open to collaboration with other producers and writers."
He began planning I Remember Mother in 1996 and worked on his pet project for a total of four years between commercial jobs. Mr. McMurtry temporarily put the film on hold when Mother died, however.
"People were really upset after he passed," Mr. McMurtry says. "I put (the film) aside for a while and decided which direction to take. When I started to do interviews again, I found all the feelings for Mother were still there. I focused on the community too, the way people were always pitching in and throwing benefits for Mother’s living expenses."
Cavellucci’s fabulous wardrobe, makeup, hairstyles and headpieces one of which included a birdcage with a live bird perched inside were also gifts from friends and admirers.
"Shops would donate gowns, people would give him gowns or the other drag queen would share," Mr. McMurtry says. "I doubt he ever paid to have his hair and makeup done. It was beautiful community thing. Everybody wanted to see Mother do well."
I Remember Mother, a documentary by Tim McMurtry and Don Mueller, is a production of FIN Pictures, 215 N. Main St., New Hope. For information on upcoming screenings, call (215) 862-6747. On the Web: www.finpictures.com