Love and war: Mark Lee on his years with the Village People

It was 1982 when Mark Lee first performed as the construction worker with the Village People, but the memories still make him cringe and, occasionally, laugh out loud. It was, to paraphrase Dickens, the best and the worst of times.

"I always wanted to be an architect," Lee explains in the living room of his Palm Springs home, surrounded by a Marcel Breuer Wasily chair and a Le Corbusier chaise. "But I was a child prodigy on the piano. I could play fluently at the age of three with no training. My father was a military fighter pilot and very homophobic. He thought anyone who worked in the arts was gay, so I never had lessons, and wasn't allowed to work in that area at all."

After high school, Lee left Sacramento, his childhood home, to study architecture at UCLA At a private party in 1980, Lee's employer suggested he play the piano and sing. Then "this little, tiny French guy, about 5'3", sitting across the room perked up when I started singing."

The man was Jacques Morali, the French songwriter and producer who created the Village People. Morali suggested Mark should join the group and replace the original construction worker, David Hodo. It took two years and several missed connections before the two met again, and Morali made good on his offer. It was not without strings.

"They called me, and I went to the Record Factory and sang in the studio. Henri Belolo [Morali's business partner] didn't want me because he thought I was too young and inexperienced, and they would have to invest a lot of time and money in this unknown commodity. But Jacques convinced Henri I was the one."

The evening of the Record Factory audition, Morali invited Lee back to his new home in Los Angeles. Once there, he propositioned him.

"I said, 'I don't want to mix business with pleasure. I really want this to happen, and you don't need me that way.' Jacques was famous for hiring beautiful people for recreational purposes. He always had Colt models on his arm, and his boyfriend at the time was this incredibly beautiful German porn star. Then Jacques told me what he wanted in the way of thanks for getting the gig. He said, 'I'm into scat.'

"I'd never even heard of such a thing. I'm this little kid from Sacramento, and I didn't know what that was, but Jacques explained. I was mortified and unnerved by the whole conversation. I sort of laughed it off and got out of there. Then he started putting the pressure on me. I avoided him until I was practicing to start touring with the group, and he gave me an ultimatum. 'Tonight's the night. You either go home with me tonight, or you're out of the group.'"

Lee refused Morali's ultimatum, but still kept his contract.

"In three weeks, they had dyed my hair blond so I looked like David Hodo, taught me 15 songs with choreography, gave me a solo, and I opened with the group in Las Vegas. I was so scared. They wanted me to look and sound exactly like David so the fans wouldn't notice the change. We played three weeks at the Desert Sands, then left directly for the Philippines for a month, then to Hong Kong for a month.

"Then it started. I got calls over and over from Jacques. He would say, 'Do you like being with the group, darling?' I would say yes, and he would say, 'Good. Because I have your replacement here now, and you'll be out of the group by the time you get back.'

"I had my two sisters come see me at the Sahara in Lake Tahoe for the dinner show. The maitre d', in the middle of the show, came and removed my sisters from their booth. My manager came to me after and said Jacques told hotel management that Mark Lee was not allowed to invite friends or family to the show - a contractual thing. My sisters were pulled out of the room. Jacques wasn't even in town at the time.

"Then other things started happening. I always took my shirt off in the show. All of a sudden I get a call from Jacques who tells me, 'I hear you're taking your shirt off in the show. You know, you're an ugly little monkey. Don't you dare take your shirt off again.'

"Or Felipe [Rose, the Indian] would do something, and we would get critiques from Jacques, who wasn't even in the country. We finally figured out Jose Eber [the hairdresser of 'shake your head, darling' fame] was spying on us. He and Jacques were thick as thieves, and he would come to our shows all the time. Jose got his start because Henri Belolo put up the money for his first salon in Paris. They always did favors back and forth for each other. I got threatening calls from Jacques all the time; he really terrorized me.

"Jacques wasn't attracted to any of the other guys, and I was the only one treated this way. He was trying to get his green card at the time; I should have gone to my lawyer and, by law, I could have gotten his ass. But I was afraid of losing the one shot I had by standing up to him. I put up with it for years, and it never got better. He put out all sorts of trashy stuff about me that eventually got back to me from people in the business. The thing that saved me was that people knew how horrible he was, and they didn't take it seriously. But it was stressful and hard to deal with. Everyone in the group knew what was going on. Jacques was the most disliked man I have ever known. He was very bitter and jealous of others, even though he had millions of dollars. He died of AIDS in 1991, and shortly thereafter, his German boyfriend committed suicide."

Next week: Disco, AIDS, alcohol, and drugs; it takes a village, people.