By Bill Stamets
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“When you start out you dress yourself, you do your own makeup, your own hair, and you write your own jokes,” explains Vilanch. “Then you become a great big star and you’re so busy doing things like this–talking on the phone and making appearances–there’s no time to sit around and write new material.” Recently elevated to head writer on Hollywood Squares, on which he also appears, Vilanch swears he doesn’t have his own writer coaching his interviews. “Otherwise I’d be wittier this morning.” So will Get Bruce! get Bruce better fees? “I had no idea the Reader was so interested in money,” says Vilanch, chortling. “It was a counterculture publication when I was there. All of a sudden it’s got capitalist like everyone else.”
At Chicago Today Vilanch could indulge himself. “I was a kind of stunt reporter,” he says. “I went on diets, I did a series on that. I traded places with a housewife–‘Mr. Mommy’–Mr. Mom was stolen from that, actually. It was in Blue Island. I will never forget it. I was there for a week, while she was going to be a drama critic for a week. She showed up for one day and took a vacation. I ran the house. I did everything but sleep with the husband, which I was also prepared to do, but she didn’t see it that way.” His being gay was a nonissue at work. “We didn’t know you had to make a declaration. It was like ‘who cares?’” says Vilanch. He kicked back at the Trip at Ohio and Rush and at Kitty Sheon’s, “a ‘wrinkle room’ where old queens hung out.”
