STORIES

Wayland Flowers, who became famous on TV for creating and voicing the sassy puppet Madame, was one of the first openly gay entertainers to find acceptance in mainstream America. When breaking into show business as an actor proved unsuccessful, Flowers began performing in bars and clubs as a puppeteer and comedian. It was during this time he created the now legendary and influential character “Madame.”

I’m Mario Cantone from Sex and the City and Just Like That, and I know a little something about sassy comedy.

After refining his cabaret act throughout the 1960s, Flowers – and Madame – debuted on The Andy Williams Show, a long-running TV variety hour. From there, Flowers became a regular presence on network TV — although it was not unusual for Madame to get more closeups. Madame was gaudy, glamorous, and bitchy… a queer icon. With an act that included edgy jokes and social commentary, Flowers began to garner mainstream success with appearances on hit TV shows such as Laugh In, The Merv Griffin Show, and The Johnny Carson Show. When Paul Lynde left Hollywood Squares in 1979, Flowers and Madame took over the center square.

Flowers offered prime-time television audiences the attitudes of 1970s-era gay men taking their first steps towards Gay Liberation, a point of view that could have been regarded as controversial and provocative to mainstream audiences. Flowers managed to do it without worrying about the network censors, because the dialogue was coming from a dummy.

By the end of his career, Flowers had won two Emmy awards, and had played such venues as the Radio City Music Hall, the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles, the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, and the Warner Theater in Washington, D.C. In 1983, he authored the book Madame: My Misbegotten Memoirs.

Sometime in the early 1980s, Flowers was diagnosed with HIV. His performing career came to an end on September 2, 1988, when he collapsed during a show at Harrah’s resort in Lake Tahoe. Several days later, Flowers was flown by air ambulance to make one last visit to his hometown of Dawson, Georgia. Then he returned to Los Angeles, where he checked into the Hughes House, an AIDS palliative care facility.

Flowers died on October 11, 1988 at the age of 48. His publicist originally reported the cause of Flowers’ death as cancer. In keeping with his request, Flowers was cremated and his ashes were interred with his dummy, Madame, in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Georgia.