Andy Warhol

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Recognizing that Ondine epitomized a generation of unrecognized queer narrative virtuosi, Warhol knew that without the vehicles that the Factory provided, Ondine would never find an appropriate forum. Like the art of many performers who worked with Andy, Ondine’s—dispensing the papal bull—is ephemeral and haphazard; its nature is to scatter itself, far from the preserving receptacles of canvas, theater, or film. Andy’s a is a time capsule of Ondine: an amber cage for the embellishing, self-destructing canary. And yet Ondine’s cadenzas assemble not a portrait of himself, but an indirect portrait of Andy, for at the book’s heart lie several conversations in which Drella reveals dreads and insecurities: he asks, “Oh when am I going to find someone who will like A.W.” An actor named Joe Campbell, nicknamed the Sugar Plum Fairy, asks Andy pointed questions, and pushes him to admit, “Well I’ve been hurt so often so I don’t even care any more,” and, “Well I want to get to the point where somebody will tell me what to do.” (Andy consistently expressed the desire for a master, a person to give him ideas; he would soon find such a boss.) Though often maddening to read, a is not a trivial artifact. Indeed, like Warhol’s movies Empire and Sleep, it is an experiment in time. The novel took twenty-four hours to write or to tape. It took countless hours to transcribe. And though it may not take twenty-four hours to read (a careful student could stretch the experience out to that length) a suffocates the reader with time’s slowness and turgidity; conversations that might in real life have passed quickly and communicated lightly their burdens, translate into resistant, illegible, and lethargic corpuscles on the page. Warhol’s game, throughout his career, was to transpose sensation from one medium to another—to turn a photograph into a painting by silkscreening it; to transform a movie into a sculpture by filming motionless objects and individuals; to transcribe tape-recorded speech into a novel. He prefers to tamper as little as possible with the experience, and thereby to highlight how the act of conversion, from one galaxy to another, disembodies and alienates the material—embalms it, expunging the soul. The personality that Andy reveals, in a, is his own: his credo is to suck spirit out of others by tape-recording them, as if the microphone were leeching animation from its victims and then preserving them. Ondine’s idiom shines through the formaldehyde: “How can you possibly speak in retrospect; I have never been there.” And yet, although his words are redacted as exactly as the flummoxed typists could manage, the novel communicates the tragic gap—jet lag from which the passenger never recovers—between a living act and its transcription on the dead page.

  Brigid Berlin (disguised as the “Duchess”) has madcap moments in a: the microphone picks up a conversation from her hospital sickbed to the Factory pay phone—inebriate fioratura, reiterating her role as Mistress Poke: “My pokes in the fannies are beautiful,” she says, and, “three things I dig; my vodka, my poke, and my pillys.” In a, Andy uses the microphone as Brigid uses the hypodermic: to administer pokes. His mike flattered a’s participants, much as Brigid’s pokes, injecting communion, exalted its victims. But the tape recorder takes more than it gives: Count Drella’s microphone intravenously and promiscuously needles the nervous systems of his entourage and feasts on their blood.

  Was Drella giving or receiving pokes himself? He took his Obetrol orally. I’m not sure what kind of sex he was having in the sixties, and who knows whether it took the form of penile pokes, given or received, but certainly, for an asexual guy, he had plenty of boyfriends during this period, though virtually none have written memoirs or recounted details. (An exception is John Giorno, star of Sleep. He wrote about their affair: “Andy had a fragile and delicate approach to sex. I jerked off while Andy kissed my legs and sniffed my crotch. Then Andy licked the big gobs of white cum from my hand and stomach. Andy had a hard-on in his black jeans. I wanted to finish him off, but he said, “I’ll take care of it.’” Giorno describes Warhol as a voyeur: “He wanted to see it, he didn’t want to touch it. He wanted to look. Occasionally, I let him suck my cock, out of compassion for his suffering.” Catch the tone: Andy the poor ugly creep.) In the last two chapters I haven’t mentioned boyfriends because Warhol’s experiences with them are underdocumented, and because the boyfriends seem only loosely integrated into Factory life. Randy Bourscheidt told me: “If the subject of Andy’s sexuality—his sexual practice—was ever mentioned, it would be to repeat the common view that he had no boyfriend. That’s what amphetamine does—you’re only interested in scoring [drugs], not in sex.” (Nonetheless, he remembers Andy’s camera focusing on his crotch during the filming of The Closet.) Although sex may have been superficially absent from Andy’s life at the Factory, five crushes stick out from the pack: Philip Fagan, a punkish package captured in photobooth portraits and countless screen tests, who lived in Andy’s townhouse in 1964 or 1965; Kip Stagg, a wild child seen wrestling with Andy (Kip on the bottom) in a photograph by Stephen Shore; Danny Williams, a bespectacled refinement who ran the strobe lights for Exploding Plastic Inevitable and Andy Warhol Uptight performances and who lived with the artist in 1965; the mysterious Richard Rheem, who appears in screen tests and in an unrestored film, known as Mrs. Warhol, playing Julia’s husband or lover; and Rodney La Rod, whom Warhol describes in POPism as “a young kid,” “over six feet tall,” who “greased his hair and wore bell-bottoms that were too short.” Ronnie Cutrone told me that Rod La Rod—a comically phallic name—often engaged Warhol in playful physical fights, wrestling and tussling in front of others at the Factory; Rod would sit on Andy’s chest, and the two would trade comments like “Hee hee, I saw your pee pee.” Cutrone called it “kid stuff.” Warhol, in POPism, tries to neutralize the relationship’s erotic content but fails: Rod would “stomp around the Factory, grab me, and rough me up—and it was so outrageous that I loved it, I thought it was really exciting to have him around, lots of action.”

  Horsing around with Rod La Rod may have looked like kid stuff, but the erotic work Andy was doing with his Polaroid camera in the 1960s was hardly juvenile, and POPism doesn’t bother sanitizing it: “During this period I took thousands of Polaroids of genitals. Whenever somebody came up to the Factory, no matter how straight-looking he was, I’d ask him to take his pants off so I could photograph his cock and balls. … Personally, I loved porno and I bought lots of it all the time—the really dirty, exciting stuff. All you had to do was figure out what turned you on, and then just buy the dirty magazines and movie prints that are right for you, the way you’d go for the right pills or the right cans of food.” Warhol’s vision of the porn cornucopia resembles his painted Campbell soup larder: find your flavor, among the thirty-two, and stick to it. American food manufacture affords a democracy of choice as bountiful as the populism of porn, its multiflavored openhandedness toward all comers.

  Andy’s erotic quest came to fruition in the films he made in the years 1967 and 1968—a series of “nudie” features, geared to the sexploitation market, which included a host of gay viewers who knew they could turn to Warhol films for up-front homoeroticism. He had an arrangement with the Hudson Theater, near Times Square: the Hudson guaranteed booking, and he tailored the films to this permissive locale, where his superstars would appear live at screenings to discuss such topics as “Pornography versus Reality.” These films have not received sympathetic treatment, even by Warhol’s staunchest fans. Stephen­ Koch, whose influential study of Warhol’s cinema, Stargazer (1974), was the first to take Warhol’s movies seriously and to do them the honor of eloquent analysis, condescends to these nudie films of 1967–68, and describes them as antithetical to the artistic films of 1963–66. Indeed, the nudies differ from the films that precede Chelsea Girls; they are not abstract studies of a single face or action (Eat, Henry Geldzahler, Sleep, Blow Job), nor are they absurdist melodramas like Warhol’s collaborations with Ronald Tavel (More Milk Yvette, Hedy, Harlot, The Life of Juanita Castro). Instead, they are comic, talky, down-to-earth; they are in color; the composition of their shots lacks the stylized care of the early
films. The nudies depended on the collaborative assistance of an attractive, antic, fast-talking young filmmaker, Paul Morrissey, who began working for Warhol in the fall of 1965, became an indispensable part of his cinematic machine, and eventually took over all directorial duties. Morrissey himself claims a large role in the making of many of Warhol’s films; he told me that he was Andy’s manager from 1965 through 1973–74, and that the movies of this period were never by Andy, who was, Paul said, “not capable of giving the slightest direction.” Other Warhol associates contest Morrissey’s jaundiced verdict on the collaboration; undeniably, however, Morrissey’s work on the films, beginning in 1965 with My Hustler, made them more accessible, pushing them toward satiric incident and away from abstraction.

  As Andy brings himself indirectly forward by obsessively tracking Ondine in a, so do Andy’s desires rise to the surface of these nudie films; paradoxically, by dispensing with authority and responsibility, and relying on collaborators, he expressed his own agenda more explicitly. The nudie films together create a portrait of Andy’s dilemma (or, conversely, his opportunity): they dwell on the rupture between a beautiful boy and an unbeautiful observer, and they probe this rupture’s effect on their experience of time passing, and on our experience of passing time as we watch them. The set-up resembles the situation in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, except, in Warhol’s case, both of the parties are young men, a symmetry that makes the dynamic of longing more complex, less patly divisible between old and young. Time moves slowly and strangely when two men are side by side and one desires the other. The more difficult it is to push that desire toward conclusion, and the more the two men resemble each other, the more protracted and profound the sensation of time in their vicinity will be.

  Of all the films, My Hustler lays out this scenario most nakedly. And it also points out how a woman’s presence alters the erotic situation between two men. My Hustler, filmed on Fire Island over the Labor Day weekend in 1965, with the assistance of Chuck Wein and Morrissey, features a young blond stud named Paul America (in real life apparently one of Geldzahler’s tricks), hired via Dial-a-Hustler by a portly balding john, played by Ed Hood. A sly, articulate woman, Genevieve Charbon, also has her eye on Mr. America; the john and the woman cat-fight over him. Ed calls her a fag hag, and says that fag hags are “meathooks and leeches.” The first reel consists of them watching the stud sunbathe on the beach. The second reel takes place in the bathroom, where Paul and another hustler (Joe Campbell, the “Sugar Plum Fairy” of a) primp, shower, urinate. Their ablutions take forever—an eternity that the viewer, like Warhol, requires: no nude scene overstays its welcome. Joe tries to get Paul to admit that he’s a hustler; Paul is cagy. Earlier I described this scene as a paradigm of Warhol’s doubled images; indeed, here, in his neatest laboratory demonstration that eros abhors a vacuum, and that beauty is dialogic, he shows that “beauty”—desirability—is never a solo; it takes two bodies, though it seems to quash one of them. The Sugar Plum Fairy may be attractive, but Paul America is young meat of the first order. The fairy wants America’s body—touches it whenever possible—but dares not make his desire too explicit. Perhaps Andy, like Sugar Plum, lusts for eidolons as ideal as Mr. America, but I am convinced that Warhol’s eye is ensnared not by the viewpoint of the man who fruitlessly pines for another but by their interdependence. Paul America’s beauty discovers itself in the Sugar Plum Fairy’s admiration; the fairy’s fawning creates a pregnant imbalance between the two men, almost as strict and salvific a rupture as sexual difference. As Genevieve intercepted Ed Hood’s pursuit of Paul America in the first reel, so Dorothy Dean, at the end of the second, interrupts the flirtatious pas de deux of the two hustlers. She appears outside the bathroom, puts on makeup while looking into a compact mirror (echoing the mirror Paul America gazed into while combing his hair), and makes him an alternate offer: “I’ll get you educated. After all, why be carved up by these old faggots?”

  The situation that structures the films of 1966 through 1968 resembles Shakespearian (or Greek) stichomythia, defined by the OED as “dialogue in alternate lines of verse, used in disputation in Greek drama, and characterized by antithesis and repetition.” Warhol’s films don’t deploy verse. But the nudies consist of scene after scene of a couple in warring dialogue—argument leading nowhere, the quarreling parties snugly interlocking. My Hustler enjoys its rhythms of discord: the two hustlers trade beauty tips and quibble over prostitution’s fine points, and the fag hag and the john argue over Dial-a-Hustler’s latest delivery. Irresolution—the parties never settle into accord—keeps the atmosphere tense. Like Martha and George in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the horny couples in the Warhol (and Warhol/Morrissey) nudies never shut up, never stop fighting, and never have sex.

  One of these films, The Loves of Ondine, shot in 1967, featured a scene-stealing performance by a new superstar, Susan Hoffman, known as Viva, a frizzy-haired, skinny, sharp-nosed, articulate, whine-voiced comedienne, her features spacious as a lost Praxiteles statue of Athena. Warhol once said, of Viva, that he never knew a voice could express so much tedium; like Brigid Berlin, she could sustain forever a monologue about her life’s minutiae, and wasn’t afraid to strip whenever necessary. Viva liked to talk about her Catholic girlhood, as did another superstar of the period, Ultra Violet, her real name Isabelle Collin Dufresne, a French aristocrat, schooled in a convent. Viva recounts her childhood’s seamy side in her roman à clef, Superstar, revealing a prurient sensibility perfectly in sync with Andy’s. In The Loves of Ondine she lies abed, topless, beside Ondine, her nipples covered by Band-Aids; she will only remove them if Ondine pays her. Viva, an off-kilter Pre-Raphaelite beauty, conveys serious levity: she delivers her improvised speeches in an affectless, cadenced monotone, as if she’s intoning mass or reading a list of war dead, even if her narration is invariably bawdy. The disconnection of her bland voice from the rough nature of her revelations resembles Warhol’s split between tone and content: lurid subject, cool presentation.

  Another superstar debuted in The Loves of Ondine: Joe Dallesandro, émigré from Bob Mizer’s AMG, beefcake capital of California. Everyone called him “Little Joe.” Small-statured, he had a perfect body and a serene disposition, and no one could ever pin him down to anything: vacillation and spaced-out contemplativeness were Warholian virtues. Curiosity and desire never flicker across Little Joe’s adolescent face; he makes heterosexuality and homosexuality seem irrelevant digressions, wastes of energy, compared with the pleasure of letting the chips fall as they may. His beauty, however, is an action, whether or not Joe ever seems to act. His good looks overpower the wisecracks of Ondine, whose manic stream of talk runs out when he shares the screen with lovely Little Joe. Word (Ondine) and image (Joe) do not gel; Mr. Paperbag knows—and is traumatized by—the gulf between. Here is the essential Warhol dilemma: speech can never catch up—no matter how much of it the tape recorder collects—to the assured and masculine stillness of visual presence. Stillness, for Warhol, was always virile, even if it took the form of a female face: stillness conjured the masculine imperturbability of the dead father.

  The Loves of Ondine, as well as several other films from this period, had a dual existence as a separate feature and as a segment of an ambitious and nearly unrealizable project, known as Four Stars, or ****, or Twenty-Four Hour Movie, or Twenty-Five Hour Movie. It was only shown once, on December 15 and 16, 1967, at New York’s New Cinema Playhouse. For The Chelsea Girls, Andy utilized the double projection format. He modified it, in Four Stars, by projecting the two reels not side by side, but superimposed, one on top of the other. I cannot begin to imagine the blinding results: two meshed films for twenty-four or more hours seems a venture at the farthest edge of the possible. Callie Angell, adjunct curator of the Andy Warhol Film Project, is at work reassembling Four Stars; when completed, it promises to be Warhol’s Finnegans Wake or 120 Days of Sodom—hubristic compendium and enclosure, an encyclopedia of every transfigur
ation he ever dreamed, final as a mausoleum and fanatical as a menagerie. A number of the films included in Four Stars have never been seen since that original screening—including Since, about the Kennedy assassination, starring Mary Woronov as Jack, International Velvet as Jackie, Ingrid Superstar as Lady Bird, and Ondine as LBJ; and Mrs. Warhol, featuring Julia Warhola in the part of an aging peroxide-dyed actress with many husbands, each of whom she’s killed. (According to Bockris, Andy said of the film, “I’m trying to bring back old people”—bring them back into fashion but also restore their youth.) One eight-hour chunk of Four Stars is Imitation of Christ, of which I have seen the 105-minute version: its subversions of Holy Family values include a sequence with Brigid Berlin and Ondine as the parents of a young stoned superstar named Patrick Tilden Close (who Taylor Mead told me could have been the James Dean of the underground). Brigid says, “What more of a family could there be but Ondine and me?” Their ménage rivals Bethlehem; Ondine shoots up in bed with Brigid—the couple’s “morning poke.” Their impersonation of parents is scary but also Utopian: we know it’s a joke, but it also seems to be Warhol’s seriously proffered alternative to the heterosexual nuclear family.

  Another portion of Four Stars with an independent existence is the rarely seen Tub Girls, in which he presents a series of doubles in a tub, duos who parallel Paul America­ and the Sugar Plum Fairy flirting in the Fire Island bathroom­—a diptych­ of unresolvable tensions, ambiguous as a metaphysical poem whose central conceit never comes clean. The tub, like a Campbell soup can condensing a meal within its silver cylinder, condenses the drama of a human dialogue, and, more effectively than theft or intercourse, seals the couple together. Not everyone in the tub is a girl: Viva bathes with a man, and, underwater, below the camera’s horizon line, appears to have sex with him. The best scene pairs Viva in the tub with Abigail Rosen, a black woman—their blackness and whiteness reiterated by the Vermeer-like checkerboard linoleum floor on which the transparent tub rests. A bird in a cage chirps behind them. Viva accuses Abigail of having dirty feet, and the water grows dark from the grapes and watermelon the girls are eating—as if the tub were condensing racial difference, the water’s transparency clouding into a complex, dark hybrid. Viva is always happy to couple on film, while Brigid remains aloof from touch, except from her own pokes. She drifts in and out of lesbianism as if in and out of coma: she refers to lesbian life as something she is profoundly over. Warhol films often conclude with a kaleidoscopically resonant image or phrase, as if the players, realizing that the reel is running out, deliberately shift to loaded ground. Tub Girls ends with Brigid talking about healing baths at Lourdes, to remind us that the tub is, after all, a site of baptism, and that the most fleshly and irreverent of Warhol’s offhand conceptions hide spiritual ramifications.