According to the Romans the Spanish rinsed their mouths with their own urine in order to whiten their teeth (something to bear in mind the next time an A-list celebrity flashes their gleaming smile for the cameras). Even today, hundreds of thousands of people in India and China drink their own urine in the belief that it can cure common ills. For some bodily waste products can even be a source of sexual ecstasy. It has been alleged that rock and roll veteran Chuck Berry, for instance, frequently paid women to urinate on his face, often returning the favour in kind. Indeed, it is widely rumoured that when police raided his house in 1990 they not only found illegally held guns and large amounts of marijuana, but a number of videotapes taken by a camera Berry had set up behind a false wall in the ladies toilets of a restaurant he owned. He had allegedly videotaped over 250 women – including schoolgirls, customers and members of staff – whilst they urinated. A former female cook at the restaurant subsequently sued Berry. Chuck’s penchant for water sports was seemingly well known in the recording industry. “Chuck’s the only guy I know who complains in a restaurant if the staff haven’t pissed in his soup,” quipped one music business source. It is widely believed that the authorities were tipped off to Berry’s activities by rival celebrity excrement fetishist Frank Zappa. Supposedly radical and zany Zappa – often referred to as ‘Frank Crapper’ due to his enthusiasm for having hookers let go a black bass on his face – was actually a closet knee-jerk conservative reactionary who secretly worked as a snitch for the FBI. He used his friendship with FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover to amass an incredible private collection of secret videotapes of various celebrities and politicians taking a dump. Whilst most of these were destroyed by Zappa’s family following his death in 1993, several survived and have recently surfaced on the internet. These include incredible footage of both Elvis Presley and Judy Garland expiring of heart attacks on the toilet as they strained to pass gargantuan turds – Presley looks as if his head is about to explode with his face turning crimson and his eyes bulging out of their sockets, whilst Garland’s face contorts into a rictus grin as her lips curl back and purple veins stand out on her forehead. In another tape President Johnson – who regularly conducted affairs of state from a toilet cubicle – is seen making the decision to commit tens of thousands of additional troops to Vietnam as he passes a stool so massive that it wasn’t completely flushed away until Nixon was in the White House. Amongst the destroyed videos is rumoured to be sensational footage of Jack Kennedy squatting over Marilyn Monroe and blowing mud all over her ample breasts, then licking it off.
Unlike Berry, Zappa managed to keep his excrement fetish out of the public eye for most of his life, although in his 1971 film 200 Crappers Keith Moon (dressed as a nun) is seen licking out a soiled lavatory bowl. “Frank just loved crap – the taste, the texture, the smell, everything about it,” recalls ‘Smoky’ Joe Dookie, one time drummer with Zappa’s band the Mothers of Invention. “Often, when we were on tour, he’d hire a hooker and get her to take a fast acting laxative before taking her up the arse – as she crapped all over his whang he’d climax, but instead of ejaculating he’d crap himself instead. They’d end up rolling around in a pool of thick brown bum soup – it was Frank’s idea of paradise, but it cost him a fortune in laundry bills to get the sheets clean!” The goateed musician is also rumoured to have produced a number of ‘fudge porn’ movies, which featured buxom young actresses variously being given enemas, wrestling in vats of excrement and flinging their own crap at each other. However, whilst highly flamboyant, Zappa and Berry were by no means the only celebrity excrement fetishists. Their fellow enthusiasts have included Robert Mitchum, who was fond of smoking his own bum cigars – an activity for which he was arrested in 1947 – believing that their fumes had hallucinogenic properties, Noel Coward, who paid prepubescent schoolboys to urinate over him in the belief that bathing in virgins’ piss was the secret of eternal youth, and Ava Gardner, who used her own excrement as a facial moisturiser.
The celebrity excrement craze probably reached its zenith in the late 1960s, with the arrival in swinging London of Indian guru Jockum Gage Baba, who attributed his amazingly youthful demeanour (he claimed to be over two hundred years old), to his habit of drinking a litre of cow’s urine a day, just as prescribed in the sacred Hindu scriptures. Actors and musicians, including Steve McQueen, Rock Hudson, Peter Sellers, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Rolf Harris, flocked to have bottles of their own urine blessed by the Holy Man, who claimed that the resulting ‘holy water of life’ could cure any ailment on earth. Indeed, Hollywood actor and director John Huston asserted that Baba had cured his impotence – within fifteen minutes of swigging a bottle of his own blessed urine he experienced his first erection since shooting an African elephant in 1952. “It was like a steel rod between my legs. I was insatiable for the next forty-eight hours,” he later wrote in his autobiography. “I shagged nine prostitutes, a female traffic warden and five sailors on shore leave from HMS London senseless.” However, excrement abuse fell from favour amongst celebrities following a series of tragedies in the early 1970s. Most notoriously, Jimi Hendrix choked to death in a Streatham hotel room in 1970 after drinking a pint of his own urine, whilst (in what is probably the most sordid celebrity scandal since the 1921 ‘wild party’ at which Fatty Arbuckle fatally sodomised three of the Keystone Cops), a prostitute drowned in Oliver Reed’s urine as he gave her a golden shower during a 1974 party at Pinewood studios. “He was drunk and just couldn’t stop,” said one witness. “It was like watching an elephant pissing – there was no way she could cope with that volume of urine.” Consequently, with the exception of a handful of die hard addicts like Chuck Berry and Frank Zappa, most celebrities opted to forgo bodily wastes for the safer, and more socially acceptable, past-times of hard drugs and alcohol.
