Page 359 - Gay Pioneers: How DRUMMER Magazine Shaped Gay Popular Culture 1965-1999

Jack Fritscher Chapter 13 341

While Embry paid many of the staff on the cheap under the table, he
paid Mario as if he were staff, so that, in one gesture of monkey business,
Mario could show an income and earn social security while at the same time
the pair of them could take home more pay from Drummer. It was their busi-
ness and their cash, but it caused resentment, and a bit of scandal, among
both the actual workers whose pay was so famously small, and the contribu-
tors who were so frequently unpaid. Besides the cash, Mario got credit where
credit was not due. Even though English was his second language, and even
though he was not a writer, nor a photographer, nor an artist, nor even
interested in any business other than his career, Embry began crediting him
as “General Manager” (issues 58-66) and as “Co-Publisher” (issues 67-98,
their last issue before the sale to Anthony DeBlase).
The ambitious Mario spurned San Francisco because, living “La Dolce
Evita (Loca),” he figured LA was better for his music career. He was one of
the main reasons that Embry, who was also permanently angry about them
both being “deported” out of LA, never quite adjusted to living in San
Francisco where they both ended up because of their Drummer publishing
venture which had found its first, best, and only success in San Francisco,
and because of their real estate holdings which they had bought during their,
to them, endless exile in the Bay Area. Neither one of them was able to make
it in LA, or even back to LA.
Frequently absent from Drummer, but never missed, Mario took extended
trips to LA well into 1990 when he appeared in Oxnard, fifty-six miles from
stardom in Hollywood, in a local production of Evita. Swimming laps in his
cologne, he was typecast with no irony as the sleazy Lothario “Magaldi,” the
over-the-top tango singer who gives Evita her first “leg up” singing “On This
Night of a Thousand Stars.” The Los Angeles Times wrote, July 19, 1990: “As
the first rung on Evita’s ladder to the top, nightclub singer and romantic idol
Augustin Magaldi, [Mario] Simon is a pompous, vain popinjay—sort of a
Wayne Newton of the pampas.” For someone who was always acting, Mario
Simon (1942-1993) just couldn’t act.

August 30, 1979 (Thursday): I drove to Berkeley to visit Sam Steward
in his home and to drive him to lunch at his favorite blue-collar steam-table
cafeteria several blocks away.

September 1979: Publication of Drummer 31. While managing the
work of incoming writers, artists, and photographers for this and future
issues, I edited the contents of this 88-page issue to which I contributed
eight pieces of my writing as well as forty of my photographs, and published

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