Mondo Phoebe

She May look like the queen of camp, but don't let the far-out threads fool you. Phoebe Légère is a pulchritudinous pop-rock phenomenon who presents herself gaudily gift-wrapped in a style she likes to call "my insane-Pilgrim look." The Pilgrim reference is well taken, because Phoebe, a Mayflower descendant and Vassar graduate who studied piano at the New England Conservatory of Music, has already become a demilegend among the night people of New York's downtown underground cultural scene. She rocks, she shocks, she shakes the rafters playing piano, accordion or hot-pink guitar. And she sings—with a pure, remarkable four-and-a-half-octave range that makes Madonna sound tone-deaf. There's no reason to suspect that the sultry blonde Légère preening in those ads for Amaretto liqueur is a bombshell of talent as well, yet Phoebe has wowed audiences from Manhattan's Carnegie Recital Hall and the trendy Tramps to the Hilton Hotel in Nairobi. Backed by her band, Blond Fox, she's currently steaming up movie screens in Mondo New York, a celebration of the bad and beautiful downtown entertainment world, where drag queens, perverts, nudists, masochists, rap singers and legitimate performing artists mingle. Phoebe's show-stopper is Marilyn Monroe, her own composition, released as a single by Great Jones Records and inspired by a dream she had after watching Some Like It Hot on TV. But let Phoebe tell it: "In my dream, I was swimming with Marilyn, and she sang a lovely song in my ear.... I woke up, and as the sun came over the hill, I wrote the song." Fanciful, maybe. Typical, also, of the pearls issuing from the painted crimson lips of a free spirit whose life literally began with a bang. "I was born on July 4, 1961, in Lexington, Massachusetts. Légère is my real name, and I am obsessed with music and beauty; can't you tell?" She paints, sketches, designs erotic lingerie, undaunted by any art form. Says Phoebe, "I never met an art I didn't like." Phoebe credits Vassar for outfitting her with aplomb as an articulate sex symbol who can rattle on about the works of Plato, Kant, Darwin and Count Basie without missing a beat. "The art director who does the Amaretto ads fell in love with me from a song I sang, Sex Object, which I had written as part of a performance spectacular called Folies Légère. That I describe as total art synthesis. I had with me the tallest, most beautiful nubile women I could find, all undulating through the creation myth. I took the audience through five billion years of earth's history in half an hour.... Well, of course, you put Darwinism together with high-fashion tits and atonal music, you have the makings of a big flop. Everybody hated it." Except the art director from Amaretto. Nowadays, her mixed reviews are more often mixed (text concluded on page 132)Mondo Phoebe(continued from page 75) with superlatives calling her fabulous, charismatic, extraordinary and comparable to Edith Piaf. She has also been labeled "the Mae West of rock and roll," and one critic rhapsodized that Phoebe's act combines "the virtuosity of Jascha Heifetz with the showmanship of Lucille Ball." Still with us? The air gets heady up here in the glowing ionosphere of showbiz hype.

Still, nobody knows better than Phoebe that hype may be helpful, but music is the name of the game. In a published essay, she riffs esoterically on "the 19th Century and a genius like Chopin, who probably had an I.Q. of 270. You're talking about some tremendous cultural achievements, like the Parthenon. Chopin's ballades and études are like the greatest Praxitelean marble sculptures and stand for all time.... It seems that musicians are traveling in the Concorde, and the public is on an old bus, behind somewhere."

Phoebe's verbal flights zoom right down to terra firma when she talks about creating a Playboy pictorial with photographer Richard Fegley. "People get mad because I don't buy into the patriarchal bullshit that the female body is disgusting. When one gazes appreciatively upon the female form, it's a religious act.... It all depends on the mental attitude you bring to it. For my money, the ancient reverence for the voluptuous magic of woman is the way to go."

Her own synthesis of blatant eroticism and art may account for Légère's becoming a local celebrity almost before she had shaken the New England dust off her spike-heeled shoes. New York's artiest writers and artists liked her style. She studied jazz with John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet. She became a chum of artist Larry Rivers and sang with him and a scholarly combo known as the East 13th Street Band; Rivers also painted her several times, most memorably as Diana the huntress. While Phoebe's anything but a one-man woman, she expresses lasting affection for aspiring film maker Nile Southern, writer Terry Southern's son. "Nile comes from a movie family," she notes. "His father eats, sleeps, drinks and breathes movies."

Appropriately, Phoebe has movies on her mind as well. She did a walk-through in Jonathan Demme's Something Wild, carrying one of her large nude paintings into camera range. On the heels of her Mondo New York success, she's up for the lead female role in a sequel to The Toxic Avenger, the pop-schlock classic that cultists revere. "I'm really excited about it, because the script is very funny. I'd play the blind girl.... The Toxic Avenger borrows money from the Devil to have her eyesight restored."

The rest of us may relish her as a constant source of surprises, but the Légère clan up in Boston, she confides, shudders to think what Phoebe will say or do next. "Both my parents are artists, but very conservative. My three sisters are all married and work for a Boston bank. They worry that I'm not married. Of course, just being a female musician or a woman of any kind is a great psychological handicap. I behaved like a boy until I reached puberty, because my parents had wanted a boy. By then, though, I understood what boys liked, and that made me what I am. But I enjoyed being a boy. I intend to have a sex change in about ten years. Maybe. Not necessarily the surgical kind." Huh? Say it isn't so, Phoebe.