Quentin Crisp is the Englishman in New York - the very one that Sting sings about in the song of that name. For most of this century, Crisp has made quite an art out of simply surviving, with great style, precisely that sort of thing - and much worse. Against most odds he is still very much with us in 1999, still attempting to help us "reconcile the glowing perception we have of ourselves with the terrible things people say about us."
His extraordinary life has been described by the writer Michael Holroyd as a strange boxing match with the rest of the world: "one where each blow struck against him has counted as a point in his favour." It has therefore been a painful contest which the polite Quentin Crisp has long since won.
It is perhaps a mark of both the man and his adopted city that Crisp, "one of the great stately homos of England", is now immortalised as a quintessentially New York experience. Like Woody Allen, Lou Reed, or Kojak, he is someone you half expect to meet on the sidewalk. And, more to the point, you probably will. Crisp can still be found stepping out along East Third Street - still very much part of New York's charm and still glorying in the squalor of the Lower East Side room which has been his home since 1982. Such is the notorious mess chez Crisp that he has been making the same jokes about it for an equally long time: "dust doesn't get any worse after four years; it's just a matter of holding one's nerve."
Tomorrow night at the Intar Theatre, An Evening With Quentin Crisp will have its final performance in a six-week engagement. The Intar is a small, cold, but welcoming place on the far western reaches of 42nd Street, a part of Hell's Kitchen that would have been rather uninviting some years ago. Born Dennis Pratt - a name with distinctly meagre possibilities - Quentin Crisp grew up in Surrey and realised, at an early age, that he was somehow different. "My father hated me chiefly because I was revolting but also because I was expensive." As a teenager in Piccadilly, he discovered that he was, as he puts it, "not alone" and so began his education in the stylised world of camp. He has carried on camping ever since.
Holroyd has written, "the response to him in Britain has been terrible, and this has afforded Mr Crisp some satisfaction. It is his form of revenge. Civilization retreats as Mr Crisp steps daintily forward."
London was hardly ready for a man in lipstick. While he contends that the sexual meaning of it was only sketchily understood, the symbolism of make-up and clothes was well recognised. After all, this was a time when, even for women, the wearing of mascara was considered something of a sin. In his autobiography, The Naked Civil Servant, he describes how 1920s men "searched themselves for vestiges of effeminacy as though for lice. They did not worry about their characters but about their hair and their clothes. Their predicament was that they must never be caught worrying about either." Quentin Crisp, however, worried a great deal about both and, having flamboyantly embraced that dandified world, he was to become "the mother superior of homosexuality" and the focus of considerable hostility.
Cult status proper arrived in 1975 when the film of the book was released. Soon the former art-school model (naked civil servant) was lecturing to packed theatres - delivering his views on everything from style to stardom with a wit that easily conquered those still uneasy about the lipstick, the purple hair and the velvet hat. He had suddenly found a new way to survive and yet, whether he was being applauded or spat at, he always maintained a uniquely determined attachment to good manners. "Nobody escapes my love," he says, "but almost everyone has tried."
It is with this in mind that Crisp, rather unwisely, insists on keeping his number listed in the Manhattan phone directory. Occasionally somebody who doesn't particularly like men in make-up will ring with a death threat.
Quentin Crisp's response is always the same: he politely asks if the caller would like to make an appointment. Such incidents apart, he is very much at home in New York. At a certain point in every talk, he will announce with passion that "in America, everyone is your friend". In New York, he maintains, he has found a home in which he will not be systematically abused and where people on the bus will kindly donate the crossword pages of their newspapers.
It is this kindness of strangers which seems to impress him most. Every stitch he wears, he tells his audience with great pride, has been given to him. And just about everything he eats and drinks is also bought and paid for by others. It is Manhattan lore that, if called, he will gladly have lunch with anyone who cares to invite him - all you have to do is take care of the cheque. It is, after all, his stated policy never to say No to anything - and his number is in the book.
At 90, Quentin Crisp looks remarkably well. As he shuffles on stage he looks more like an ancient gunfighter than a naked civil servant. Dressed entirely in black, he wears a long coat, a very expansive yet jaunty hat, shiny boots and a bootlace tie with a silver brooch. In fact, he looks not unlike the harmless great-grandfather of Jack Palance. He also wears a single leather glove: the other one, it seems, is simply for waving around as he introduces himself with the words: "I have been asked to give straight talk but I'd rather prefer to give a bent one." The much-photographed face is still bright and clear and, surprisingly much less severe than it used to look in the heavy make-up of his earlier days. His skin has that arresting translucence of considerable old age and the famous voice is still sweeping and dramatic. Depending on the angle of his head he can appear both imperious and innocently gentle. He may be a touch unsteady on his feet, but from the security of the armchair, every movement is regal and bold. No surprise perhaps that a few years ago he acted with great distinction in the movie Orlando, as Queen Elizabeth I.
As the song by Sting played him off the stage, Quentin Crisp, as good manners would dictate, waited in the foyer to greet anyone who wished to speak to him. I couldn't help thinking that a man of 90 shouldn't really be sitting in a cold 42nd Street theatre between 9th and 10th Avenues on a freezing January night, but he seemed quietly content with the whole affair. He nodded primly to everyone, received his little presents and signed his books. When everyone was happy, someone hailed him a cab and soon he was gone: the resident alien, back to East Third Street, back to 17 years of dust and a lifetime of simply holding his nerve.