Andy Warhol

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  The first of the erotic trilogy, Kiss, filmed in September through December of 1963, was actually a series of short films, each a one-hundred-foot-long cartridge. In each, a couple kiss, in tight close-up. The mouths look odd, wet, the tongues unpleasantly athletic; I find myself wondering, “Did people kiss differently in 1963?” Certainly the men seem aggressive, more so than might be tolerable today, and the women are often giggling. These kisses played as “Andy Warhol Serial” at screenings organized by the experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas: the installments of Kiss were like cartoons or newsreels, foreplay to the evening’s central attraction. Baby Jane Holzer—one of Andy’s first Superstars, whom Tom Wolfe called “Girl of the Year” in a cynical essay—kisses John Palmer; when recently she saw Kiss again for the first time in thirty years, she exclaimed, “Who am I kissing?” and then, after a few puzzled moments, shrieked, “It’s John Palmer!” Naomi Levine, costar of Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of, kisses several men, one at a time. Most remarkably, two androgynous figures smooch, and we assume they are a young man and woman, until the camera pans backward (a rare instance) to reveal that the couple are two shirtless young men necking on a couch, with a Warhol painting of Jackie Kennedy propped behind them. Warhol didn’t exhibit the Jackie silkscreens until 1965; here, the painting, not yet a masterpiece, not yet valuable, functions as wallpaper, though also as an icon of a minatory goddess, as if Jackie were observing the boys kiss and giving their embrace an explanation, an historical context. (If any viewers of Warhol’s classic images of Jackie and other iconic women were to doubt their homoerotic specificity, this moment from the rarely seen Kiss clarifies for all time that Warhol’s choice of female figures for memorialization in silkscreens depended on an atmosphere of homoerotic license, a Factory where boys could kiss on the couch, and where, moreover, they could be filmed kissing, not because Warhol wanted to shock viewers, but because he believed that nothing could be more worth documenting—nothing could be more abstract and hence aesthetic—than queer fondling.) We don’t know the identity of the boys smooching under Jackie’s eye; they become algebraic ciphers for homo-erotic desire. Despite my conviction that Warhol is celebrating their kiss, he remains distant from it; the viewer never knows whether the artist appreciates or is horrified by the activities he records.

  One of the kissers in Kiss wears a wristwatch. The watch reminds us that time is passing within the film, a specific duration in 1963, now lost. Because the film runs at silent speed, our time, as we observe, is longer than the wristwatch’s. Arousal’s slowness ripens in the next of the erotic trilogy, and perhaps the greatest film Warhol ever made, Blow Job (1964), a film of almost unbearable intimacy—unbearable, because one realizes, watching it, that one has never before spent forty minutes without pause unselfishly looking at a man’s face during the course of his slow movement toward orgasm. In life, as opposed to Warhol’s cinema, there are always other things to look at; Warhol gives us, in Blow Job, six one-hundred-foot-long reels, black-and-white, dramatically lighted, of an unnamed man’s face in close-up as he is being given a blow job, the film’s title leads us to presume. We can’t verify that fellatio is happening. We take it on faith. His expressions—from boredom to ecstasy—appear authentic. We can tell when he reaches climax because, after the grimaces subside, he lights a cigarette.

  Much in Blow Job is unverifiable. We don’t know whether a man or a woman is fellating the actor. Perhaps several different men or women, perhaps one per reel. We may even wonder whether Warhol himself is servicing his star, while someone else mans the Bolex. Thus we don’t know the recipient’s sexual preference: he looks like trade (a straight man who, especially if paid, lets another man blow him). We don’t know whether he truly reaches climax, or merely fakes it. There is no money shot: evidentiary ejaculation, a porn staple. Every Warhol fan has a version of the story behind Blow Job. The most convincing: the guy getting head is a New York actor who appeared in smut as well as Shakespeare. The Warhol Museum has copies of a porno in which this actor performs. (No one knows what became of him. No one knows whether he ever saw Blow Job.) He resembles Marlon Brando or Gerard Malanga; the likeness must have excited Warhol. The surprise is that his face recalls that of the actress Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Without the title (Blow Job), one would have guessed that here was a man in pain, on the stake or the rack, suffering death or religious ecstasy. He winces; sometimes he appears to weep.

  Any description of Blow Job will fail to express its sublimity—its seriousness, its tortured play of interrogating light and oneiric shadow. Watching, sitting silently for forty-one minutes, observing a portrait of a face that seems more a painting than a film, I have time to muse on the entire history of sexuality, as well as my own personal sexual history; I have the privacy, and the leisure, to study a human face in its most intimate and lonely transport. Here, a face is offered for our contemplation but not for our consumption. Here, religious and profane meanings collide more keenly than in any other Warhol image: we see a physiognomic record of the “blows” that Job received. The hero’s ecstasy shows that the payoff for stoicism, in Warhol’s view, is the ability to transvalue pain into pleasure. The title of Warhol’s first commercial art assignment comes to mind: he illustrated an article in Glamour magazine entitled “Success Is a Job in New York.” Both Warhol and his nameless actor have certainly achieved metropolitan success.

  The action in Blow Job may suggest sacred sensations, unlike the goings-on in Couch, the most explicit of his early films—a frankness that will only be equaled, later in his career, by Blue Movie. Psychoanalysis, via the title, and the sole prop or set (a couch), enters the picture, however; Warhol never spent analytic time on the couch, perhaps because he spent so much valuable time on his own Factory couch. (Freud might have recognized in Warhol a colleague, a systematic explorer of wish and drive. Indeed, Andy was invited to speak, in 1966, at the annual banquet of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. He brought his rock group, the Velvet Underground, along.) Warhol’s Couch, filmed in 1964, seems to have been, like Kiss, a serial—various reels of people cavorting on the Factory couch. I wonder, even thirty-five years after its making, how on earth Warhol got these people to do such things in front of a camera. In the land of Couch, there is only pleasure, no shame. Most astonishing are the scenes of Gerard Malanga getting a hand job and then a blow job from Robert Olivo, nicknamed “Ondine,” a nonstop raconteur and speed freak whose eloquence and temper titillated Warhol. Ondine, in all his future film appearances, as well as in his tape-recorded (and transcribed) monologues, is flamboyantly queer; Gerard is not. And yet Gerard has already, by 1964, made the transition from painting assistant to polyperverse superstar. As Malanga put it to me, “I had fewer inhibitions then.” Baby Jane Holzer, who appears, clothed, in an early segment of Couch, was unaware of the sexual events in the later reels, and was not present for their filming.

  The Factory was not, despite appearances, a twenty-four-hour orgy; Andy was still living with his mother, although we can safely presume that he did not invite her to see Couch filmed or screened. And yet Andy’s camera, a spy, could incite sex, earn the right to see it. His Bolex authorized and legitimized excess. It functioned as a moral solvent, a mechanized confessional, dragging out bugaboos and detoxifying them, the absolving repetitions of reels like a host of Hail Marys. Not that the participants in Couch were flooded with guilt. Why should they have been? Warhol and his cast knew what they were up to: abstracting sexuality from its particulars. Abstract was Andy’s favorite word to describe sex. Sex was abstract because it was not just a feeling or an action but a complicated impersonal system, a set of signs and practices, remote from Mr. Paperbag’s—or anybody’s—internal storied turmoil. Listen to him describe, in an interview, the pornographic impulse, the vérité urge to capture the drives. This interview took place in 1969, when Warhol’s filmmaking had nearly ceased but his wish to see had not. Here, he ignores his
detractors’ moralistic charges and defines the one-to-one correspondence of sexual revelation and cinematic time (one exposed reel of film equals one sexual exposure):

  Interviewer: It’s been suggested that your stars are all compulsive exhibitionists and that your films are therapy. What do you think?

  Warhol: Have you seen any beavers? They’re where girls take off their clothes completely. And they’re always alone on a bed. Every girl is always on a bed. And then they sort of fuck the camera.

  Interviewer: They wriggle around and exhibit themselves?

  Warhol: Yeah. You can see them in theaters in New York. The girls are completely nude and you can see everything. They’re really great. …

  Interviewer: Have you actually made a beaver yet?

  Warhol: Not really. We go in for artier films for popular consumption, but we’re getting there. Like, sometimes people say we’ve influenced so many other filmmakers. But the only people we’ve really influenced is that beaver crowd. The beavers are so great. They don’t even have to make prints. They have so many girls showing up to act in them. It’s cheaper just to make originals than to have prints made. It’s always on a bed. It’s really terrific.

  Therein lies the philosophy of Couch; it’s easier, cheaper, and more aesthetically efficient to make originals of sex acts on the bed or couch than to piece together a conventional work. He saw in pornography’s methods a paradigm for artistic economy in general, for his primary desire was to perpetrate maximum exposure, maximum veracity, and maximum profit. Couch snever made a cent; it was hardly even exhibited. But Warhol’s future efforts could rest on its conceptual bedrock.

  He praised “beaver” films, but the 1950s “cock drawings” reveal his priorities. Beaver and pussy, words Warhol loved to use whenever possible, particularly in dictated texts he knew would be published, betray his uncertain—derisive?—relation to women. He relished the female-centered worlds of fashion, face, beauty, commodity, and decor. Women were among his greatest subjects, in silk-screens and films. And yet, despite his identification with women, and his fear and dislike of homophobic men, he also felt vulnerable to female assault. Case in point: in fall 1964, a woman of occult disposition named Dorothy Podber entered the Factory, aimed a gun at a stack of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe paintings, and shot a hole through them. Warhol, always receptive to mistakes and accidents, saw them christened the Shot Marilyns, including a Shot Red Marilyn, a Shot Orange Marilyn, and a Shot Light Blue Marilyn.

  4. Torture

  ANDY MET EDITH MINTURN SEDWICK, known as Edie, at a party in early 1965. Chuck Wein, her Svengali, a handsome, clean-cut, manipulative Harvard boy who managed her unmanageable career, tells the compilers of the oral history Edie: “She was doing her dance—a sort of balletlike rock ’n’ roll. We’d had an idea of opening up an underwater discotheque where Edie’d dance her ballet to Bach played at rock ’n’ roll tempo.” (Tempo alteration was also Andy’s forte.) Sam Green, who organized Andy’s first retrospective in 1965, told me that Edie was more eyecatching than Elizabeth Taylor: “Every bit of Edie was fine.” She became Andy’s new superstar. His desire for female doppelgängers was not the usual story of a male artist seeking his anima: he used these women not to consolidate his masculinity but as his accomplices in taking it apart. Edie was the most sensational of these foils. She wouldn’t last long at the Factory, but she left more of an impression on Andy and on the public than did any other of his mirroring sidekicks.

  Before Edie there had been Baby Jane Holzer of the parabolic coiffure, star of his film Soap Opera, in which images of a guy rubbing his crotch or of Gerard shirtless on a couch are juxtaposed with real television commercials of 1964—ads for wave-controlling hair cream, for Jerry Lewis’s muscular dystrophy drive. Jane, like Edie, was high society, but Edie, unlike Jane, came with a patina of things intellectual; Edie implied metaphysical depth and the charm of book learning, even if she hadn’t endured much of it herself.

  She changed her appearance to match his, and he adopted her look—or else his carriage unconsciously grew svelte and assured, imitating hers. She gave him the confidence to pare down his movements and to reformat his erratic mannerisms as a high style. She was the first ravishingly beautiful woman to pay him entire attention, to seem, for a moment, almost in love with him. He may have wanted her quickly out of his life, but for most of 1965 she was his rationale. Billy Name cut her hair; she dyed it silver. Her eyebrows were thick and dark as Liz’s, an undisguised car-crash scar between them. She had a troubled history—breakdowns, hospitalizations—and came from a wealthy and prominent New England family, littered with wrecked hopes. Her dangling, spidery, ambitious earrings, in Warhol film appearances, cast mythic shadows on the walls. She modeled for Vogue and Life, wearing black tights and oversize shirts, mod updates of the outfit Judy Garland wore to sing “Somewhere There’s a Someone” in A Star Is Born. Edie had sensational legs; everybody said so. She may have wanted to break into Hollywood, but starring in a series of Andy Warhol films was not a logical step in that direction.

  Hollywood, then or now, wouldn’t know what to do with Edie, who was undisciplined, and whose genius lay in unpremeditated, unhindered gestures. Moving onscreen, she choreographed her own baroque ballet—a troupe of one, without narrative engine. She seemed always to be dancing to an inaudible, imaginary song. Andy, ambivalent about movement, nonetheless specialized in movement artists: his stars excelled at perverse pliés, undinal paroxysms. He made films of men—Jack Smith, Paul Swan, Taylor Mead—whose movements, not conventionally graceful or beautiful, broke masculine rules and argued for expressivity as life’s purpose: he liked to see limbs sent reeling, the unnatural spasms of St. Vitus’ Dance, a tropism toward death. Edie’s sinuous movements obeyed inscrutable inner promptings and didn’t aim to communicate. Instead, she seemed hypnotized by her own gestural carnival. She was a dandy’s dream: woman as a work of art. She became Andy’s Shirley Temple, his tap-dancing “upper”; he could get high just by watching her move. She was high most of the time (“Andy liked high people,” said superstar Ultra Violet), and Andy himself was taking a quarter Obetrol, a diet pill, once a day.

  Edie starred in a series of Andy’s movies: Poor Little Rich Girl (titled after the Shirley Temple vehicle of 1936), Beauty #2, Camp, Afternoon, Inner and Outer Space, Space, Lupe. Here were his first experiments in a cinema vérité of the female everyday. In them he created a “cinema of attractions,” which film historian Tom Gunning claims was the origin of motion pictures. At its start, the art of cinema was equivalent to burlesque—a peep or freak show. Narrative came later in its evolution (as it would arrive later in Warhol’s film career), and the storytelling impulses of cinema have always sparred with its aim simply to present a female attraction. Poor Little Rich Girl offers us nothing but the breakthrough—you’ve got to see her!—of Edie rising in the morning, putting on makeup, dressing. The process takes a long while. Andy was attracted to Edie’s wealth: she could afford to take her time doing nothing. The entire first reel of Poor Little Rich Girl is unfocused; the blur hides Edie’s features, and invisibility gives her a privacy that the next reel will destroy. In the second reel, she is back in focus, but her appeal is thereby reduced. She no longer looks like a Degas painting.

  In Edie’s first film appearance, as an extra in Vinyl (1965), she nearly steals the show. Mascot, addendum to the action, she watches a male sadomasochistic tableau and seems untraumatized and unmoved by it. Andy recognizes—feels kinship with—Edie’s elite indifference, her nonparticipatory adjacency to the homoerotic scene she half observes and half ignores. He prefers to see desire centrifugally scattered into two separate bodies, two spectacles, neither influencing the other; he prefers a relation that is not a dialogue but a cold juxtaposition, the two pieces echoing in heartless analogy.

  Vinyl is one of the few Warhol films to be based on a prior text—Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (Warhol bought the rights for $
3,000). Ronald Tavel, who worked with Andy on many films at this time, wrote the scenario: Andy understood, once he began making sound movies, that he’d need a collaborator to devise dialogue and action, and so he enlisted Tavel, a playwright. (In a documentary on Warhol’s cinema, Mirror for the 1960s, Tavel describes Warhol’s directorial method as torturing performances out of his cast.) The manifest subject of Vinyl was torture. Gerard Malanga, who plays the juvenile delinquent Victor, is one victim. Subjected to aversion therapy, he is tied to a chair, a mask over his face; electrical tape binds his chest, hot wax drips onto his flesh, and he is force-fed “poppers” (amyl nitrate). The inhalation is not simulated. Progressively more stoned during the movie, by its end he is incapacitated, and we feel we’re watching a snuff film, a document of genuine torture. Warhol kept Gerard out late the night before the filming, to prevent him from learning his lines, and invited members of the press to watch the shooting, to put the actors on the spot. He introduced Edie into the film at the eleventh hour, over Gerard’s objections: Gerard didn’t want any women in it, but Andy told him that Edie looked like a boy, so she would fit in. According to Tavel (quoted by Victor Bockris in his biography): “he was laying into Gerard and sabotaging him. His motivations were to prevent the film from looking like a normal movie, and to get at Gerard.” In Vinyl, Gerard’s torture occupies the frame’s foreground; the background is a more authentic-looking sadomasochistic scene involving hot wax and poppers—a newsboy tortured by a doctor and his assistant. At moments, Edie seems on the verge of intervening. Always, a split governs Andy’s work: in Vinyl, the image is riven between Gerard’s torture on the left side of the screen, and Edie’s regardless dance on the right. Edie watches the torture of Gerard, but she doesn’t comment on it; at one moment in the film, she dances with him, but otherwise she remains in a separate, observing sphere. Perhaps she dances to distract herself from the nearby torture. Perhaps she dances to narrate it. Perhaps, for Edie, dancing is torture—her tormenter the offscreen director who licenses her perpetuum mobile.