Holly Woodlawn Takes Manhattan in Musical Comedy Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers

SCARECROW IN A GARDEN OF CUCUMBERS 

(Robert J. Kaplan, USA, 1972, 82 minutes) 

I'm not certain if Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers was the first film to feature a trans woman in the lead, but it was surely one of the first to simply let her be her authentic self. 

Something similar could be said of Paul Morrissey's 1971 Andy Warhol-produced feminist satire Women in Revolt, which also features trans superstar Holly Woodlawn, in addition to Candy Darling and Jackie Curtis.

Woodlawn may have been trans in real life--though she didn't use the term--but Eve, the character she plays in this film, comes across as cisgender. She's just a Midwestern girl looking to make her name in the Big Apple.

 

As with its star, the cast came primarily from Warhol's Factory, Off-Broadway, burlesque revues, and the world of bathhouse entertainment. 

Bette Midler associate Jerry Blatt composed the music, and Midler sings most of the songs: "Get It On" and "Nothin Goin' Down at All" (both with Mike Lincoln), "Love Theme," and the lovely "Strawberry, Lilac and Lime."

 

In her breathless 1991 memoir, A Low Life in High Heels (with Jeffrey Kenneth Copeland), Woodlawn describes her third feature as "a riotous romp of oddities and mishaps" that took three months to shoot. There were ups and downs, but for the most part she had a blast, though director Robert J. Kaplan did tell her that if she didn't stop drinking, he would pull the plug, and so she did…though she reverted to her old ways once filming wrapped. 

 

Predicting the loopy suburbanites of John Waters' filmography, the cheeky comedy–pun intended–opens with a set of clueless parents looking down at the camera, and wishing their unseen daughter well as she leaves home. As they turn to enter the house behind them, Kaplan reveals that they aren't wearing any pants or skirts or even underwear. Just two bare bottoms. 

 

Significantly, the film was released the same year as Lou Reed's ode to some of the Factory's brightest lights, "Walk on the Wild Side," which immortalized Woodlawn, Darling, and Curtis and would become better known than Kaplan's film, which also follows a young-woman-in-the-big-city story line. 

"Holly," as Reed spoke-sang, "Came from Miami, F-L-A, hitch-hiked her way across the USA, plucked her eyebrows along the way, shaved her legs and then he was a she…she says, 'Hey babe, take a walk on the wild side'...said, 'Hey honey, take a walk on the wild side'."

 

While Emmaretta Marks, an original Hair cast member, sings the title song, "Scarecrow," a bus makes its way from Topeka, Kansas to New York City where Eve gets off with her luggage. Instead of a cab, she grabs a ride with a nun who predicts the ride-hailing drivers of more recent vintage. She's driving a cab (poorly) in order to earn enough money to take the orphanage to see Jesus Christ Superstar. After swearing at another driver, she drops Eve off at the Chelsea Hotel, where much of the filming took place. 

 

After settling in, Eve connects with her fashionable friend, "Margo Channing" (Yafa Lerner), who has a side line in sex work, so men assume Eve does, too, but she just wants to act. She's also pretty naïve, but not stupid, and quickly figures out why strange men keep referring to Margo as "$5.95"--it's the price she charges for blow jobs (the equivalent of $45.52 today). 

 

At this point, you can probably guess Eve's last name. That’s right, it's Harrington, though Woodlawn's acting style reflects an even earlier era, since she has screwball energy. She's a very physical performer, a little like Shelley Duvall. She doesn't seem capable of standing still or keeping quiet for very long, and the expression on her elastic face is constantly changing. 

These qualities apply to Woodlawn's other early performances, too, like Holly in Morrissey's 1970 film Trash, except that's a darker work overall, even if Woodlawn brings the light. In Caden Mark Gardner and Willow Catelyn Maclay's insightful 2024 book, Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema, the authors describe her as "wildly expressive." Though they don't cover Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers, they do discuss Trash and Women in Revolt in a section titled "The Warhol Superstars: Pioneers Without a Frontier."

 

As Eve explores NYC, she keeps running into a woman named "Mary Poppins" (actress and nightclub singer Tally Brown, another Factory figure) traveling with a harem of hunky men. While Eve is thin, awkward, and discreet, Mary is zaftig, confident, and extravagant. She also has some of the highest hair and thickest false eyelashes I've ever seen. Though in part because of the era in which it was made and the milieu in which it takes place, the makeup and costuming throughout are truly show-stopping. 

 

Margo, who is preparing to leave town, introduces Eve to Mary in hopes she can help her find an apartment. She also encourages her to spiff up her look, so Eve gives herself a glam makeover, except no one notices until she meets "Rhett Butler" (Woodlawn in male drag). Their meet-cute at a snooty party is truly cute--and pre-dates Oscar-nominated trans actress Karla Sofía Gascón's male drag in last year's Emilia Pérez by a whopping 52 years.  

Rhett, a producer who speaks with a Bela Lugosi accent, invites Eve to his brownstone. She's thinking about her career, while he's thinking about…something else. This sequence, which begins in total darkness, takes a brief swerve into horror territory before Eve makes her escape. 

 

Once the dust settles, she meets up with Mary, after which Brown sings a number on screen. Her throwback aesthetic lies somewhere between Bessy Smith and Janis Joplin, though more kittenish than either. In the lyrics, she says she came to NYC from Texas. 

Eve sings, too, and though Woodlawn has less of a voice, her charisma combined with the sparkly outfits, pretty boys, and Busby Berkeley-on-a-budget set design goes a long way. That sequence plays out in black and white. Another plays out in shades of brown, like a daguerreotype, and yet another plays out in still images, like Chris Marker's La Jetée--but faster. 

 

If there's a theme to Sandra Scoppettone's sole screenplay, it's that all these women came to the city to make a name for themselves, and that straight men can be a real pain in the ass (the men surrounding Mary appear to be gay). As two potential roommates, "Baby" and "Jane Hudson" (Kathryn and Margaret Howell), put it, "Men are nothing but little boys who have never grown up. They're selfish, evil, egotistical, sex crazy, and repressed." 

Eve and Mary both have some pretty not-so-great encounters with heterosexual men, though the last straight guy Eve meets, a diminutive wrestler named "Joe Buck" (Sonny Boy Hayes) is not so bad...though his sister is another story.

 

Scoppettone, a playwright and author of YA and mystery novels, was already out, more or less, when she got involved with the project. When Holly's boozing got out of control, Kaplan extricated her from the Chelsea Hotel, and sent her off to stay with Sandra, a former alcoholic, and her girlfriend. 

Not so coincidentally, one of Scoppettone's best known novels, 1976's The Late Great Me, dramatizes a teen's battle with the bottle. The book proved such a sensation that it was adapted into an Emmy Award-winning ABC After School Special, The Late Great Me! Story of a Teenage Alcoholic, in 1979. 

 

Eve's adventures in roommate-wrangling continue until the very end of the picture, at which point she decides to move to Hollywood, which seems to come from out of nowhere, though Holly's name seems to insist upon it.  

Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers was designed for maximum enjoyment, and that's what it delivers. Kaplan, by way of Scoppettone, doesn't appear to be trying to deliver a political message, though presenting a trans performer in such an unconflicted, uncomplicated way is political by its very nature. 

 

The film has been compared to the work of Robert Downey, Sr., and that makes sense in terms of his anything-goes approach to race, rather than gender or sexual orientation, in 1969's Putney Swope. Or the human form itself in 1970's Pound, in which actors play different breeds of dog. 

 

I was also reminded of Milos Forman's 1971 countercultural comedy Taking Off, and there's a degree to which all of these films and filmmakers intersect, beyond the fact that they're all set or based in NYC, since Forman would adapt Hair into a feature, and Hair co-writer Gerome Ragni--spelled "Jerome" in her memoir--was among Woodlawn's Chelsea Hotel social set.

 

Not all of it works–or works perfectly–but that's no crime when it comes to by-the-seat-of-your-pants lunacy. Instead of a pie fight, for instance, there's an ice cream brawl in Central Park, an improv class taught by sexist wackadoo "Walter Mitty" (David Margulies in his film debut), pigtailed health food nut "Ninotchka" (Suzanne Skillen), and other zaniness of that ilk. 

 

What the film reflects in 2025, however, is freedom. There was a time in American life when anything seemed possible, and this was one of those times, but life would not be easy for some of these players. Though Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin, who has an audio cameo as Laugh-In phone operator Ernestine, would go on to bigger things, not everyone would follow suit.

Robert J. Kaplan, for instance, who followed up with a 1976 softcore Jaws parody called Gums, never made another film. After serving as production manager on Henry Jaglom's 1976 Tracks, he virtually disappeared. 

 

By the time of her death in 2022, Emmaretta Marks, who made an impression on rockers from Jimi Hendrix to Deep Purple--they even wrote a song about her--had lived with dementia for several years. As Margaret Hall noted in her 2022 Playbill obituary, "Ms. Marks had no formal retirement or life insurance plan; her family is currently taking donations to cover her funeral and burial expenses."

 

Seven years before, playwright and performance artist Penny Arcade had set up a GoFundMe for her friend, Holly Woodlawn, who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. She died that same year. As Arcade put it in her appeal, "Holly gave visibility long before it was comfortable to do so and also gave thousands of people both hope and pleasure." Among those pleasures is this sweet and goofy film in which her ebullient spirit takes full flight. 

 

 

If you missed it when it played, for one night only, at this year's SIFF, the Academy Film Archive's new 4K restoration of Scarecrow in a Garden of Cucumbers plays the Beacon Cinema on June 13. Images: the IMDb (Holly Woodlawn in closeup and in B&W with sausages), Cinema 5 Distributing / Slant (Woodlawn in Trash), Hari Nef's Instagram (Tally Brown), Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (Woodlawn's big musical number), and Lost Classics of Teen Lit: 1939-1989 (The Late Great Me book cover).