#dreamlander

COOKIE MUELLER

Dorothy Karen “Cookie” Mueller (March 2, 1949 – November 10, 1989) was an American actress, writer and Dreamlander who starred in many of filmmaker John Waters’ early films, including Multiple Maniacs, Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble and Desperate Living.

Cookie Mueller grew up with her parents Frank Lennert Mueller and Anne (Sawyer) Mueller in the Baltimore suburbs in a house near the woods, a mental hospital and railroad tracks. She was nicknamed Cookie as a baby: “Somehow I got the name Cookie before I could walk. It didn’t matter to me, they could call me whatever they wanted.”

In his book Shock Value, John Waters credits Mueller with the title for his 1974 film Female Trouble. When she was hospitalized for pelvic inflammatory disease in Provincetown, Waters and Mink Stole visited Mueller. “What happened, Cook?” Waters asked. “Just a little female trouble, hon,” she replied.

Nan Goldin created and widely exhibited The Cookie Portfolio 1976–1989, a series of fifteen portraits, after Mueller’s death. One photograph, “Cookie and Vittorio’s Wedding” (1986), documents Mueller’s wedding to Vittorio Scarpati, an Italian artist and jewelry designer from Naples who died of AIDS just seven weeks before Mueller.

Mueller wrote the health column “Ask Dr. Mueller” for the East Village Eye and later served as art critic for Details. Mueller’s books, Ask Doctor Mueller (1996), a collection of her writings; Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black (1990), a memoir; and Garden of Ashes (Hanuman Books, 1990) are cult classics. Other works include the novella Fan Mail, Frank Letters, and Crank Calls (Hanuman Books, 1988) and several collections of short prose.

Mueller died from AIDS-related causes on November 10, 1989 in New York City, aged 40. Her ashes are interred in multiple locations: on the beach near Provincetown; in the flowerbed of the Church of St. Luke in the fields in Greenwich Village; alongside those of Vittorio and her dog Beauty in the Scarpati family crypt in Sorrento, Italy; under the statue of Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado in Rio de Janeiro; in the South Bronx; and in the holy waters of the Ganges River. She was survived by her son, Max Wolfe Mueller, who appeared in Pink Flamingos.

The last of Cookie’s quotes, an elegy of her intent and existence, was written shortly before her death:

“Fortunately I am not the first person to tell you that you will never die. You simply lose your body. You will be the same except you won’t have to worry about rent or mortgages or fashionable clothes. You will be released from sexual obsessions. You will not have drug addictions. You will not need alcohol. You will not have to worry about cellulite or cigarettes or cancer or AIDS or venereal disease. You will be free.”