Haynes was a kind of prodigy, who
was lucky enough to have been born into
a cultured and progressive extended fam-
ily, presided over by his liberal-thinking
maternal grandfather, Arnold Semler,
“the Almighty Bompi,” as Haynes called
him, and his charismatic, artistic wife,
Blessing, with whom Haynes sometimes
painted. Sherry, whose own ambitions
were deferred until her later years, when
she studied theatre with prominent
teachers, including Salome Jens at the
Stella Adler Studio, encouraged all her
son’s art-making. Within the family,
Haynes’s constant engagement with cre-
ativity turned him into a “child of God,”
according to his father. (In “Dottie Gets
Spanked,” the boy is depicted as a little
king, complete with paper crown, rul-
ing over his imaginative domain with
his superpowers.) “We’d come home
from a movie and my wife and I’d be
fixing dinner, and he’d be sitting at the
piano and playing one finger, one finger,
one finger,” Allen told me. “Forty-five
minutes later, we’d come in and he’d be
playing the whole melody from the
movie. Now, where that came from I
don’t know. I mean, he was a little scary
to me. I was awed by the multitalents
that were part of his everyday being.”
When Haynes was seven, his grand-
father, who had been the head of set
construction at Warner Bros.—until the
late forties, when the HUAC investiga-
tions and the blacklisting of his friends
made the position untenable—arranged
for him to meet his TV idol, Lucille
Ball, and watch her rehearse. (That event
became the erotically charged inciting
incident of “Dottie Gets Spanked,”
in which the boy sees the aloof, no-
nonsense Ball preparing offscreen for a
scene in which her ditzy, caterwauling
alter ego is spanked by her husband.)
In addition to taking Haynes to con-
certs, plays, and museums, his grand-
parents took him, at age nine, to New
York and to Washington, D.C., and, at
fourteen, to Asia. Their support extended
into adulthood. Bompi invested more
than a hundred thousand dollars in “Poi-
son,” Haynes’s first feature.
In 1968, the seven-year-old Haynes
appeared on “The Art Linkletter Show.”
In response to the inevitable question
“What do you want to be when you grow
up?,” he replied, “An actor and an artist.”
The same year, his parents took him to
see Franco Zeffirelli’s film adaptation of
“Romeo and Juliet.” It was a seismic ex-
perience that “absolutely changed my
life,” Haynes said. At nine, he made his
first movie: a fifteen-minute Super-8 ver-
sion of “Romeo and Juliet” in which he
played almost all the parts. “I made the
tunics out of towels, tied a rope around
the middle, got tights,” Haynes said. “My
dad would run the camera, and hold the
sword offscreen when I was playing Mer-
cutio. And then we’d do the other side
and I’d dress in Tybalt’s outfit.” Haynes
drew the backdrop for the Capulet ball
with crayons on a big piece of butcher
paper. The Nurse was played by his six-
year-old sister, Wendy, who also per-
formed in the after-dinner plays that
Haynes regularly conceived and staged.
When Wendy was very young, he would
drape a blanket over her bedroom table
and light the space with a reading lamp,
creating a mini-amphitheatre in which
he acted out melodramatic tales with her
toy horses. “She was my audience,” he
said. “I remember just loving to make
her cry.” Wendy Haynes, now a thera-
pist as well as the lead singer of the glam-
rock band Sophe Lux & the Mystic, was
charmed by her brother’s mind. “Who
was this creature?” she said. “What’s goingon in there? It wasn’t stopping. It was a
train. It left the station when he was
born. It’s a beautiful thing to see some-
one who knows his destiny.”
For a decade, Haynes attended week-
end classes at Virginia Rothman’s Art
School, in Studio City, and he used his
art to make contact with the show-biz
icons he adored. When he drew a pic-
ture of Diana Ross with six arms, ac-
cording to his father, he managed to de-
liver it to her backstage at the Universal
Amphitheatre. When he was in high
school, his mother drove him to Joni
Mitchell’s home in Bel Air so that he
could give her his illustrations of some
of her lyrics. “I knocked on the door, and
a sort of Joni clone came to the door, in
a bikini with long blond hair,” Haynes
told me. “And she said, ‘Oh, that’s so
sweet. Thank you. I’ll give them to her.’”
The actress Elizabeth McGovern, who
was Haynes’s best friend at the progres-
sive Oakwood School, in North Holly-
wood, remembered him being indignant
that Mitchell never responded. She
added, “He had that sense of himself—
to think that it was rude of her. He was
just a high-school kid.”
“Eyes should be seen not hid” are
the first words spoken in “Dottie Gets