Happy Hour
In which we spend 60 minutes with your faves, doing what makes them happiest.
For most Halloween-heads, the calendar swipe to October 1 is a celebratory day that brings skeleton yard ornaments and whispered Pumpkin Spice Latte orders. But for Cassandra Peterson — better known as Elvira — the month of the macabre is a little more complicated than that. On this particular October 1, the 74-year-old has emerged from her enclave in Los Angeles to promote her latest project, Elvira’s Cookbook From Hell. Having swapped her jet-black wig for her lesser-seen auburn waves, Peterson is now poking around the crevices of Halloween Adventure NYC, the costume shop that haunts the East Village year-round. She runs her hand along a rack of eroticized cartoon ensembles: Sexy Tinkerbell, Sexy Cookie Monster, Sexy Knockoff Princess Peach. What we’re really looking for, though, is a wearable version of her. “The Elvira costume cumulatively has been the No. 1 best-selling female costume in America,” Peterson estimates, as if she were a contestant on Shark Tank. “And my costume is here somewhere, damnit!”
We’ve actually walked right past it — the store owner, who’s operated the place for 40-odd years, was so excited about her arrival that he brought every Elvira wig and costume he had in stock to the front lobby display. His fandom is very much warranted: The Mistress of the Dark has stretched her run as the witchy man-eater like a spider’s web, spanning two films, the long-running variety series Elvira’s Movie Macabre, a memoir, and now, a cookbook with recipes like Guaca-Morbid and Bloody Hell Mary. Elvira has been the labor of Peterson’s life; she’s still hustling to enshrine her legacy as the queen of Halloween. And despite the fun façade, playing Elvira is grueling physical work: She’s a wisecracking, tata-twirling temptress — or, as she pouts in the 1988 film Mistress of the Dark, “the gal who put the boob back in boob tube.”
Peterson is still as sharp as the dagger affixed to Elvira’s waist, though she no longer cares to dress up as her alter ego. “No one wants to see an old drag queen,” she says in a huff as we descend farther into the labyrinthine shop. “I’ve been doing it for 45 years, putting on that same drag every day, and it just got to be like, When do I get a break?” These days, the process of getting into costume — white powdered face, garage-door lids, and falsies so long they tickle her brow — feels like defaulting to autopilot for 90 minutes. “It was like I was in a coma, usually in some horrible dressing room somewhere behind a bar,” she remembers. “I’ve even done it when I had the flu, and I had to get up and barf every couple of minutes. So I laid on my back on the bed and did my makeup.”
As we pass by each of the shop’s many mirrors, Peterson checks her second-day hair, fluffing it up at the roots as needed. She shrugs the habit off, but you can’t really blame a woman whose career relies on the precision of her image. Before Elvira and her short-lived stint as a Vegas showgirl, Peterson grew up training in ballet, scrutinizing herself in mirrored rooms. Sadly, her tenure as a prima ballerina didn’t last long: “I did it only when I was thin, and then my boobs got too big to really do ballet,” she says, wandering over to the store’s collection of adult tutus. “Going across the floor was like boing-boing-boing.” She finds one that meets her standards and plucks it from the wall: “This is good. Everyone needs one of these!”
Next, we stop at a cabinet of vintage, gothic treasures and a row of multicolored boas. “Oh, this is all good stuff, I love this. Feathers, glitz, diamonds,” she says, running her fingers through the fluffy cluster. “Anything shiny catches my eye,’” she adds, laughing. “Us girls, we’re like ravens or crows.” These boas are reminiscent of Peterson’s past life as a Playboy model (she says she once turned Hugh Hefner down when he offered her the centerfold) and a teenage go-go dancer. “I grew up wearing extremely skimpy outfits, so I was never embarrassed to show off my body. I thought, Why not? What’s the matter with that?” she says. “I always thought I had a good figure, so I was like, I’m gonna show it off. Like, man, my boobies have made me a whole career. I always say, ‘Opportunity only gives you knockers once, and you really have to take advantage.’”
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Halloween will always be Peterson’s favorite season, though this time around she’s more interested in finding an outfit for her dog Vinny a.k.a Vincent Price (“I’m gonna go as a nun or wear, like, a mumu and flip flops,” she insists). We loiter in the canine costume section for ten minutes looking for a cape because Vinny’s going as Superdog this year. She grabs a Chucky outfit for a pooch, calling it a “pretty awesome” back-up. There’s also a Great White Bark costume, but Vinny, a poodle mix with a pink mohawk, wouldn’t put up with it, Peterson says. “It costs more money to keep up his hair than mine.”
A towering stack of sombreros catches her eye. Back in the day, Peterson tells me, her mom and aunt ran a costume shop in Colorado Springs, where she spent her days after school stuffing tiger tails and slapping price tags on wigs. These sombreros remind her of the hats her mother kept in her shop: “When we were on summer vacation in California, we’d drive down to Tijuana as a family, and my mom would get all these sarapes and sombreros and ponchos and tequila and all kinds of booze and fireworks, and my dad would stuff them inside the doors of the car, and we would smuggle them back.”
While she still identifies as a party girl and loves a good soirée (hence, writing a book on throwing them), Peterson admits it’s been nice to slow down and allow her Elvira beehive wig to collect a little dust in the closet. She’s not throwing back dirty martinis like she used to (“Oh my god, girl, I don’t know how I used to have that many drinks and still be upright”). These days, a rowdy night consists of a piping hot bowl of pasta — which she’ll eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner whenever possible — and a horror film with her partner Teresa “T” Wierson. Among her recent standouts are Nosferatu (“Beautiful, gorgeous, loved it, I’ve seen it twice”), Sinners, Weapons, and The Substance, which she interpreted as a comedy. “People were staring daggers at me in the theater, but I couldn’t stop laughing,” she says. “I’m at that age where I related to it a little too much. I’m looking for some damn substance out there that doesn’t turn me into a three-eyed monster.”
Watching Peterson shimmy throughout the store with a boa draped across her shoulders, I don’t think she needs the substance. Maybe Elvira, the costume, is something that lives on in plastic snap bags in Halloween stores like this one — where the vampy femme fatale sits in piles alongside the rest of the most profitable IP-based characters. But unlike her neighboring monsters and fairies, Elvira is a more politically charged symbol, a slapstick punch in the nuts to the apparent sexlessness of the conservative party — and a cleavage-touting challenge to the notion that women’s sexuality should exist only in service to men. Greedy, lewd, murderous, impulsive, horny, and a crybaby drama-puss, Elvira might be a caricature to Peterson, but to me, she’s the ultimate bimbo — the perfect embodiment of all my favorite acts in the grand drag performance that is womanhood. For decades, she has spun the horror of being a woman into comedic gold: Elvira murdered men after she bedded them and beat roadside perverts to a pulp, all while wiping the windshield of her squeaky black Thunderbird and its spiderweb grille with her tits. And if you’ve ever wondered what happened to those bedazzled spider tassels from the grand finale of Mistress of the Dark, Peterson still has them, tucked away for safekeeping. “Four years ago, I put them on and twirled ’em in my show at Knott’s Scary Farm,” she said. “It’s like riding a bike. You learn it, and it stays with you forever. You just never forget.”
