Playwright Robert Heide, 91, died on Dec. 17. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he wrote numerous Off-Off-Broadway plays, including Hector, West of the Moon, Why Tuesday Never has a Blue Monday, At War with the Mongols, Suburban Tremens, and Crisis of Identity; his The Bed was filmed by Andy Warhol. As a writer, Heide became the Henri Murger of the new Bohemians of 1960s-70s Greenwich Village, writing books and articles on the playwrights, novelists, artists, performers, and characters of the era (he lived on Christopher Street, and witnessed the Stonewall Riots). It is claimed that he wrote the scripts for Andy Warhol’s Chelsea Girls and Lupe (but I’ve seen them and damned if either one had a “script”), and appeared in Warhol’s Batman Dracula and Camp. Heide and his longtime companion, John Gilman (who survives) often collaborated on books and plays. “I wanted to be Marlon Brando or Jimmy Dean,” Heide once said. “When I came to New York, I studied with Uta Hagen and Stella Adler, who befriended me. However, one day Judith Malina, co-founder of The Living Theater, said to me, ‘You’re not an actor. Go home and write a play!’”
