The Mammoth Book of Vampires: New edition (Mammoth Books)

by Stephen Jones

  In 1956, the year Around the World in 80 Days took the Best Picture Oscar, Andy took an extended trip with the frustratingly unforthcoming Charles Lisanby – Hawaii, Japan, India, Egypt, Rome, Paris, London. Throughout that itinerary, he saw vampires living openly, mingling with the warm, as adored as they were feared. Is it too much to suppose that, in a maharajah’s palace or on a Nile paddle-wheeler, spurned by Charles and driven to abase himself before some exotic personage, he was bitten ?

  – Conklin, ibid.

  ‘Gee, who is that boy?’ asked Andy, evenly. ‘He is fantastic’

  Penelope was used to the expression. It was one of Andy’s few adjectives. Everyone and everything was either ‘fantastic’ or ‘a bore’ or something similar, always with an elongated vowel early on. All television was ‘fa-antastic’; World War II was ‘a bo-ore’. Vintage cookie tins were ‘si-imply wonderful’; income taxes were ‘ra-ather old’. Famous people were ‘ve-ery interesting’; living daylight was ‘praactically forgotten’.

  She turned to look down on the dance floor. They were sitting up on the balcony, above the churning masses, glasses of chilled blood on the table between them, at once shadowed enough to be mysterious and visible enough to be recognizable.

  There was no point in coming to Studio 54 unless it was to be seen, to be noticed. At tomorrow’s sunset, when they both rose from their day’s sleep, it would be Penny’s duty to go through the columns, reading out any mentions of their appearances, so that Andy could cluck and crow over what was said about him, and lament that so much was left out.

  It took her a moment to spot the object of Andy’s attention.

  For once, he was right. The dancer in the white suit was fantastic. Fa-antastic, even. She knew at once that the boy was like her, nosferatu. His look, his style, was American, but she scented a whiff of European grave-mould. This was no newborn, no nouveau, but an experienced creature, practised in his dark-skills. Only a vampire with many nights behind him could seem so young.

  It had to happen. She was not the first to come here. She had known that an invasion was inevitable. America could not hold out forever. She had not come here to be unique, but to be away from her kind, from her former lives. Though she had inevitably hooked up with Andy, she did not want to be sucked back into the world of the undead. But what she wanted meant very little any more, which was as it should be. Whatever came, she would accept. It was her duty, her burden.

  She looked back at Andy. It took sharp senses indeed to distinguish his real enthusiasms from his feigned ones. He had worked hard – and it did not do to underestimate this languid scarecrow’s capacity for hard work – to become as inexpressive as he was, to cultivate what passed in America for a lack of accent. His chalk-dusted cheeks and cold mouth gave nothing away. His wig was silver tonight, thick and stiff as a knot of foxtails. His suit was quiet, dark and Italian, worn with a plain tie.

  They both wore goggle-like black glasses to shield their eyes from the club’s frequent strobes. But, unlike some of his earlier familiars, Penny made no real attempt to look like him.

  She watched the dancer spin, hip-cocked, arm raised in a disco heil, white jacket flaring to show scarlet lining, a snarl of concentration on his cold lovely face.

  How could Andy not be interested in another of the undead? Especially one like this.

  At least, the dancing boy meant the night wasn’t a complete wash-out. It had been pretty standard, so far: two openings, three parties and a reception. One big disappointment: Andy had hoped to bring Miz Lillian, the President’s mama, to the reception for Princess Ashraf, twin sister of the Shah of Iran, but the White House got wind and scuttled the plan. Andy’s fall-back date, Lucie Arnaz, was hardly a substitute, and Penny was forced to make long conversation with the poor girl – whom she had never heard of – while Andy did the silent act most people thought of as deliberate mystification but which was actually simple sulking. The Princess, sharp ornament of one of the few surviving vampire ruling houses, was not exactly on her finest fettle, either – preoccupied by the troubles of her absolutist brother, who was currently back home surrounded by Mohammedan fanatics screaming for his impalement.

  In the car between Bianca Jagger’s party at the Tea Rooms and L.B. Jeffries’s opening at the Photographers’ Gallery, Paloma Picasso rather boringly went on about the tonic properties of human blood as face cream. Penny would have told the warm twit how stupid she was being about matters of which she plainly knew nothing, but Andy was frozen enough already without his faithful vampire companion teeing off someone so famous – Penny wasn’t sure what exactly the painter’s daughter was famous for – who was sure to get his name in Vanity Fair.

  At Bianca’s, Andy thought he’d spotted David Bowie with Catrine Deneuve, but it turned out to be a far less interesting couple. Another disappointment.

  Bob Colacello, editor of Inter/VIEW and Andy’s connection with the Pahlavis, wittered on about how well the Princess was bearing up, and was trying to sell him on committing to an exhibition in the new museum of modern art that the Shah had endowed in Teheran. Penny could tell that Andy was chilling on the idea, sensing – quite rightly – hat it would not do well to throw in with someone on the point of losing everything. Andy elaborately ignored Bob, and that meant everyone else did too. He had been delighted to learn from her what ‘being sent to Coventry’ meant and redoubled his use of that ancient schoolboy torture. There was a hurt desperation in Bob’s chatter, but it was all his own fault and she didn’t feel a bit sorry for him.

  At the Photographers’, surrounded by huge blow-ups of war orphans and devastated Asian villages, Andy got on one of his curiosity jags and started quizzing her, Penny, about Oscar Wilde. What had he been like, had he really been amusing all the time, had he been frightened when the wolves gathered, how much had he earned, how famous had he really been, would he have been recognized everywhere he went? After nearly a hundred years, she remembered Wilde less well than many others she had known in the 1880s. Like her, the poet was one of the first modern generation of newborn vampires. He was one of those who turned but didn’t last more than a decade, eaten up by disease carried over from warm life. She didn’t like to think of contemporaries she had outlived. But Andy insisted, nagging, and she dutifully coughed up anecdotes and aphorisms to keep him contented. She told Andy that he reminded her of Oscar, which was certainly true in some ways. Penny dreaded being recategorized from ‘fascinating’ to ‘a bore’, with the consequent casting into the outer darkness.

  All her life, all her afterlife, had been spent by her own choice in the shadows cast by a succession of tyrants. She supposed she was punishing herself for her sins. Even Andy had noticed; in the Factory, she was called “Penny Penance’ or ‘Penny Penitent’. However, besotted with titles and honours, he usually introduced her to outsiders as ‘Penelope Churchward, Lady Godalming’. She had never been married to Lord Godalming (or, indeed, anyone), but Arthur Holmwood had been her father-in-darkness, and some vampire aristos did indeed pass on titles to their get.

  She was not the first English rose in Andy’s entourage. She had been told she looked like the model Jane Forth, who had been in Andy’s movies. Penny knew she had only become Andy’s Girl of the Year after Catherine Guinness left the Factory to become Lady Neidpath. She had an advantage over Andy’s earlier debs, though: she was never going to get old. As Girl of the Year, it was her duty to be Andy’s companion of the night and to handle much of the organizational and social business of the Factory, of Andy Warhol Enterprises, Incorporated. It was something she was used to, from her Victorian years as an ‘Angel in the Home’ to her nights as last governess of the House of Dracula. She could even keep track of the money.

  She sipped her blood, decanted from some bar worker who was ‘really’ an actor or a model. Andy left his drink untouched, as usual. He didn’t trust blood that showed up in a glass, and nobody ever saw him feeding. Penny wondered if he were an abstainer. Just now, the red pinpoints in h
is dark glasses were fixed. He was still watching the dancer.

  The vampire in the white suit hooked her attention too.

  For a moment, she was sure it was him, come back yet again, young and lethal, intent on murderous revenge.

  She breathed the name, ‘Dracula.’

  Andy’s sharp ears picked it up, even through the dreadful guff that passed for music these days. It was one of the few names guaranteed to provoke his interest.

  Andy prized her for her connection to the late King Vampire. Penny had been at the Palazzo Otranto at the end. She was one of the few who knew the truth about the last hours of il principe, though she jealously kept that anecdote to herself. It was bad enough that the memories lingered.

  ‘The boy looks like him,’ she said. ‘He might be the Count’s get, or of his bloodline. Most vampires that Dracula made came to look like him. He spread his doppelgangers throughout the world.’

  Andy nodded, liking the idea.

  The dancer had Dracula’s red eyes, his aquiline nose, his full mouth. But he was clean-shaven and had a bouffant of teased black hair, like a Broadway actor or a teenage idol. His look was as much Roman as Romanian.

  Penny had understood on their first meeting that Andy Warhol didn’t want to be just a vampire. He wanted to be the vampire, Dracula. Even before his death and resurrection, his coven had called him ‘Drella’. It was meant to be cruel: he was the Count of the night hours, but at dawn he changed back into the girl who cleared away the ashes.

  ‘Find out who he is, Penny,’ Andy said. ‘We should meet him. He’s going to be famous.’

  She had no doubt of that.

  Flushed from dancing and still buzzed with Nancy’s blood, Johnny moved on to the commerce of the night. The first few times, he had set up his shop in men’s rooms, like the dealers he was rapidly putting out of business. Spooked by all the mirrors, he shifted from strip-lit johns to the curtained back rooms where the other action was. All the clubs had such places.

  In the dark room, he felt the heat of the busy bodies and tasted ghosts, expelled on yo-yo strings of ectoplasm during orgasm. He threaded his way through writhing limbs to take up his habitual spot in a leather armchair. He slipped off his jacket, draping it carefully over the back of the chair, and popped his cufflinks, rolling his sleeves up to his elbows. His white lower arms and hands shone in the dark.

  Burns, on a break, came to him first. The hook throbbed in his brain, jones throbbing in his bones like a slow drumbeat. The first shot of drac had been free, but now it was a hundred dollars a pop. The bouncer handed Johnny a crisp C-note. With the nail of his little finger, Johnny jabbed a centimetre-long cut in the skin of his left arm. Burns knelt down in front of the chair and licked away the welling blood. He began to suckle the wound, and Johnny pushed him away.

  There was a plea in the man’s eyes. The drac jolt was in him, but it wasn’t enough. He had the strength and the senses, but also the hunger.

  ‘Go bite someone,’ Johnny said, laughing.

  The bouncer’s hook was in deep. He loved Johnny and hated him, but he’d do what he said. For Burns, hell would be to be expelled, to be denied for ever the taste.

  A girl, in a shimmering fringed dress, replaced the bouncer. She had violent orange hair.

  ‘Is it true?’ she asked.

  ‘Is what true?’

  ‘That you can make people like you?’

  He smiled, sharply. He could make people love him.

  ‘A hundred dollars and you can find out,’ he said.

  ‘I’m game.’

  She was very young, a child. She had to scrape together the notes, in singles and twenties. Usually, he had no patience for that, and pushed such small-timers out of the way to find someone with the right money, as curt as a bus driver. But he needed small bills too, for cab fare and tips.

  As her mouth fixed on his fresh wound, he felt his barb sink into her. She was a virgin, in everything. Within seconds, she was his slave. Her eyes widened as she found she was able to see in the dark. She touched fingertips to her suddenly sharp teeth.

  It would last such a pathetically short time, but for now she was a princess of the shadows. He named her Nocturna, and made her his daughter until dawn. She floated out of the room, to hunt.

  He drew more cuts across his arm, accepted more money, gave more drac. A procession of strangers, all his slaves, passed through. Every night there were more.

  After an hour, he had $8,500 in bills. Nancy’s ghost was gone, stripped away from him in dribs and drabs, distributed among his children of the night. His veins were sunken and tingling. His mind was crowded with impressions that faded to nothing as fast as the scars on his milky skin. All around, in the dark, his temporary get bit each other. He relished the musical yelps of pain and pleasure.

  Now, he thirsted again.

  Vampires show up in the 1950s fashion drawings, if only through coded symbols: ragged-edged batwing cloaks, draped over angular figures; red lipstick mouths on sharp-cheeked black and white faces; tiny, almost unnoticeable, fangs peeping from stretched smiles. These in-jokes are self-criticism, a nervous admission of what had to happen next. To become Andy Warhol’, the illustrator and window-dresser must die and be reborn as an Artist. Those who accuse him of being concerned only with his earnings – which, to be fair, is what he told anyone who would listen – forget that he abandoned a considerable income to devote all his energies to work which initially lost a lot of money.

  Shortly before the Coca-Cola Bottle and Campbell’s Soup Can series made him famous, and in a period when he feared he had recovered from one ‘nervous breakdown’ only to be slipping into another, Warhol did a painting-synthetic polymer and crayon on canvas – of Batman (1960), the only vampire ever really to be embraced by America. Though justifiably eclipsed by Lichtenstein’s appropriations from comic-strip panels, Batman is an important work in its own right, an idea seized but abandoned half-finished, the first flash of what would soon come to be called Pop Art. Like much from the period before Warhol hit upon repetition and manufacture as modes of expression, it seems incomplete, childish crayon scribbles across the cowled Bob Kane outline of the classic vampire vigilante. Exhibited at the Castelli Gallery, the work was the first Warhol piece to command a serious price from a private collector – an anonymous buyer on behalf of the Wayne Foundation – which may have encouraged the artist to continue with his personal work.

  During an explosion of creativity that began in 1962 and lasted at least until he was shot, Warhol took a lease on a former hat works at 231 East 47th Street and turned the loft space into the Factory, with the intention of producing Art on a production line. At the suggestion of assistant Nathan Gluck, Warhol seized upon the silk-screen process and (‘like a forger’), turned out series of dollar bills, soup cans and Marilyn Monroes. It seemed that he didn’t care what his subjects were, so long as they were famous. When Henry Geldzahler, Assistant Curator for 20th Century American Art at the Metropolitan Museum, told him that he should apply himself to more ‘serious’ subjects, Warhol began his ‘death and disaster’ series, images of car crashes, suicides and the electric chair. Straddling the trivial and the serious are his vampire portraits: Carmilla Karnstein (1962), Vampire Doll (1963), Lucy Westenra (1963). Red-eyed and jagged-mouthed undead faces, reproduced in sheets like unperforated stamps, vivid greens and oranges for skin tones, the series reinvents the ninetenth-century genre of vampire portraiture. The vampire subjects Andy chose shared one thing: all had been famously destroyed. He produced parallel silk-screens of their true deaths: impalements, decapitations, disintegrations. These are perhaps the first great works, ruined corpses swimming in scarlet blood, untenanted bodies torn apart by grim puritans.

  In 1964, Andy delivered a twenty-by-twenty black and white mural called Thirteen Vampires to the American pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, where it was to be exhibited beside work by Robert Rauschenberg and Roy Lichtenstein. Among the thirteen, naturally, was Warhol’s fi
rst Dracula portrait, though all the other undead notables represented were women. The architect Philip Johnson, who had commissioned the piece, informed Warhol that word had come from the Governor that it was to be removed because there was concern that it was offensive to the Godfearing. When Warhol’s suggestion that the portraits all be defaced with burning crosses to symbolize the triumph of the godly was vetoed, he went out to the fair with Geldzahler and another of his assistants, Gerard Malanga, and painted the mural over with a thick layer of undead-banishing silver paint, declaring And that’ll be my art.’ We can only speculate about that lost Dracula portrait, which none of the few who saw it can describe in detail. Which of the many, many images of the King of the Vampires – then, truly dead for only five years – did Warhol reproduce? The most tantalizing suggestion, based on Malanga’s later-retracted version, is that for the only time in his entire career as an Artist, Warhol drew on his own imagination rather than copied or reproduced from life. Andy lied constantly, but this is the only occasion when anyone has ever accused him of making something up.

  Warhol’s first experiments with film, conducted in real time with the coopted collaboration of whoever happened to be hanging about in the Factory, are steeped in the atmosphere of vampirism. The camera hovers over the exposed throat of John Giorno in Sleep (1963) as if ready to pounce. The projection of film shot at twenty-four frames per second at the silent speed of sixteen frames per second gives Giorno’s six-hour night a suggestion of vampire lassitude. The flashes of white leader that mark the change of shots turn dirty sheets into white coffin plush, and the death rattle of the projector is the only soundtrack (aside from the comical yawns and angry ticket-money-back demands of any audience members happening upon the film in a real theatre). That same year, Warhol shot more explicit studies of vampirism: in Kiss, a succession of couples osculate like insects unable to uncouple their complex mouth-parts; in Eat, Robert Indiana crams his mouth with unidentifiable meats; and Suck-Job is an extended (thirty minutes) close-up of the face of a young man who is being nibbled by beings who never intrude into the frame or register on film. For Suck-Job, Warhol had arranged with Alex Ford, a real vampire, to ‘appear’ but Ford didn’t take him seriously and failed to show up at the Factory for the shoot, forcing the artist to substitute pasty-faced but warm hustlers dragged off the street.