Sexplosion

by Robert Hofler

  Another inmate told Holly not to worry. “They’re just looking for dope.”

  “Dope?” Holly asked. “In my underwear?”

  “Shut up!” the officer ordered. “And pull down your pants.”

  Holly did as told.

  “Get that man out of here!” screamed the officer, to a wild chorus of screams from the female inmates.

  “And the next thing I knew I was in a paddy wagon on my way to the Tombs,” Holly reported, referring to the men’s jail. It was a nightmare. Men hit on her for sex. “I have my period!” she cried.

  Then a riot broke out among the homosexual inmates. According to Holly, the police instigated the uprising. “They used the prisoners like pawns in a chess game,” she reported. “What they wanted was more money, more guns, more billy clubs, more helmets, and more police to protect them from all those dangerous prisoners behind the bars. So they cut down on our meals and took away our rock radio station and told us we’d get them back if we began screaming and rioting. Then they gave us hostages—they threw these flunkies into our cells and gave us knives and clubs.”

  For eight days, the inmates went without being able to shower or, even worse, watch TV. Holly spent most of her time under her bed. “Finally, the police got what they wanted—more police.”

  Holly Woodlawn, however, remained in jail, unable to join Joe Dallesandro, Andy Warhol, and Paul Morrissey for the premiere of Trash at the Garrick Theatre. Joe was especially riding high, his crotch having been photographed for the cover of the Rolling Stones’ upcoming album, Sticky Fingers. Holly’s no-show at the premiere inspired Variety to come up with one of its better headlines, “Trash Star Found in Trash Can.” And when a journalist from another newspaper inquired into why Andy Warhol didn’t pay the thousand-dollars bail so his superstar could attend her own premiere, a Factory apparatchik informed the reporter, “Holly only worked for us for eight days. We’re sorry she’s in jail, but we’re not responsible.”

  The person answering the phone at the Factory had it only half right. Trash took just six days to shoot and Holly Woodlawn had been paid $25 for each of those days for a film that went on to gross $1.5 million on a $25,000 budget. But she was a star now. And not just a superstar. The New York Times, fortunately, had added a new film critic to its staff, a would-be poet and playwright named Vincent Canby, who was as liberal and forward-thinking in his reviews as Bosley Crowther had been mired in the Pliocene. Canby not only liked Trash; he loved its female lead.

  “Holly Woodlawn, especially, is something to behold,” he wrote, “a comic-book Mother Courage who fancies herself as Marlene Dietrich, but sounds more like Phil Silvers.”

  Using feminine pronouns to describe a transvestite, Canby broke a major taboo at the Times.

  OTHERWISE, IT WAS NOT a good time to be a Warhol superstar.

  Lance Loud first noticed the big German shepherd bounding down the beach. Then he saw the dog’s owner, a girl in a pixie dress. There were real flowers stuck in her brown hair. Lance had been sunning himself on the sand at Isla Vista, just north of Santa Barbara, and as he watched the girl and her dog, a bunch of college boys who’d been playing catch football also stopped to watch her. It was Edie Sedgwick, although Lance doubted any of the college jocks knew who she was. Lance, on the other hand, had been reading about Edie ever since his father, Bill Loud, had given him an article on Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol, written in Time magazine years ago.

  “Look at this crazy, crazy, crazy guy!” Bill had exclaimed, pointing to a photograph that accompanied the article. There was Edie and Andy with their matching outfits, matching hair, matching expressions of fervent expectation.

  “Well, what’s wrong with them?” Lance asked.

  “Well, this guy has dyed his hair silver and his girlfriend has dyed her hair silver, and she wears these big ball earrings,” Bill began. “This guy must be making a million bucks and all he does is silk-screen soup cans and Brillo boxes at a place called the Factory. He’s going around with some young girl and they both dyed their hair silver and go around with a group of weirdoes.”

  There on the beach of Isla Vista, the college boys didn’t know who Edie was. They just wanted to fuck her, Lance knew.

  He, on the other hand, wanted to meet her. More precisely, he wanted to be her.

  Lance had never seen Edie with brown hair, not that he’d ever seen her in person before, even though her family came from Santa Barbara and were these wealthy rancher-philanthropists whose family dated back to the American Revolution. Edith Minturn Sedgwick. That was Edie’s real name.

  Lance approached her as soon as she and her dog came out of the ocean—unlike the college boys who just stood there gawking. “Dumb,” he called them.

  Edie’s eyes were so sad, he thought. “I’ve wanted to meet you for the longest time,” Lance began.

  “Oh, thanks,” she said in this baby voice. They kissed, and she asked, “You aren’t a fag, are you?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I’m so tired of fags. That’s all I ever knew in New York. Fags. Fags. Fags.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, I don’t ever want to meet another one in my life. All the boys were so pretty, but they all liked other boys.”

  The conversation pretty much ended there, after Lance said good-bye.

  Later, it was common knowledge in Santa Barbara that Edie Sedgwick had recently spent time drying out from a drug overdose at the city’s Cottage Hospital. Friends there told Lance that she had sex with guys all the time. She’d lock the door so the doctors and nurses couldn’t get in. Even though she invited Lance to come visit her at the hospital, he never did.

  However, his encounter with Edie on the beach got him to thinking. If she knew nothing but fags in New York, maybe that was the place for him.

  LOOKING BACK AT 1970, Jules Feiffer would remark, “If anyone had said that calling someone a fag was the equivalent of calling someone a nigger, they would have thought you were crazy.”

  “Fags.” It’s just one of the words they were using to describe Luchino Visconti’s newest project over at Warner Bros.

  Surprisingly, there was a bit of a star tussle over who’d get to play the lead.

  Burt Lancaster openly petitioned to play a homosexual pedophile in Death in Venice. The movie star had worked with Visconti years earlier on The Leopard, and he lobbied hard to play the repressed Gustav von Aschenbach in the screen adaptation of Thomas Mann’s novel. Visconti, however, never considered anyone but Dirk Bogarde for the role.

  In Mann’s classic novel, von Aschenbach is a writer. Visconti wanted to be extremely faithful to the story, but he did make one major change—the von Aschenbach of his film would be a composer. “You know it is about Mahler, Gustav Mahler,” Visconti told Bogarde. “Thomas Mann told me he met him in a train coming from Venice; this poor man in the corner of the compartment, with make-up weeping . . . because he had fallen in love with beauty. He had found perfect beauty in Venice and must leave it in order to die.”

  Mann’s wife, Katia, placed the story closer to home. In her memoir, she wrote that the idea for Death in Venice came during a holiday in Italy’s floating city when she and her husband were staying at the Grand Hotel des Bains in the summer of 1911:

  “All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience. . . . In the dining room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family . . . and the very charming, beautiful boy of about thirteen was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband’s attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn’t pursue him through all of Venice—that he didn’t do—but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often. . . . I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: ‘What a story! And a married man with a family!’ ”

  Nearly sixty
years later, the executives at Warners—men like Ted Ashley and John Calley—weren’t exactly outraged, but neither were they very keen to see a movie version of the novel. Despite the success of The Damned, they didn’t trust Visconti’s commercial instincts. Yes, they may have been wrong about homosexual Nazis. But homosexual composers definitely weren’t box office. That much they knew for sure. They had a few suggestions for Visconti: one, they wanted a bigger star than Bogarde, and two, how about changing the boy Tadzio to a girl named Tadzia?

  Visconti wondered aloud, “But if I change Tadzio to a little girl, and we call her Tadzia, you seriously believe that American audiences would be prepared to accept that?”

  The men at Warners seriously did.

  “You do not think that in America they mind child molestation?” Visconti asked.

  They did not foresee a problem. As one of the executives put it, “We are not as degenerate here as you are in Europe.”

  Visconti persisted. “This is a search after purity and beauty. Surely people will recognize that? They have been reading the book for many years. Even in America.”

  Visconti, buoyed by the box-office success of The Damned, got to keep his Bogarde and his Tadzio. After all, his movie wasn’t about a fiftyish homosexual lusting after a young lad in Venice. “This is a search after purity and beauty,” he kept saying.

  It was a search that Visconti himself undertook—a monthlong tour of Scandinavia and Poland, in fact—to find just such purity and beauty among the young males who lived there. Advertisements were placed in the major newspapers of Stockholm, Oslo, Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Warsaw; they kicked off a full-scale talent hunt for beautiful boys between the ages of thirteen and fourteen who were required to possess the requisite blue eyes and blond hair of Mann’s dream. It didn’t take Visconti long to be smitten. In Stockholm, the first boy to be interviewed—a thirteen-year-old named Björn Andrésen—walked into Visconti’s hotel room accompanied by his grandmother. It didn’t matter that he spoke with a Swedish accent. Visconti wanted him to remain “enigmatic, mystic, illusion,” and gave his character no lines to speak. He just had to be beautiful, blond, blue-eyed.

  Perhaps it was sheer duty that led Visconti to keep his appointments to interview dozens of other young boys in Warsaw, Oslo, Helsinki, and Copenhagen. Despite that tour of other cities, Visconti had already decided that Andrésen was Tadzio.

  Regarding the other half of his acting equation, Dirk Bogarde arrived in Italy accompanied by Anthony Forwood, whom he introduced as his manager, even though the two men had lived together for almost a decade. That heterosexual charade on the movie set extended to the casting of Visconti’s boyfriend’s “girlfriend” Marisa Berenson, who played von Aschenbach’s wife. Visconti and Helmet Berger continued to be lovers, but since making The Damned it had become a strained relationship. When Visconti once complained that younger actors have “everything handed to them,” Berger shot back, “You don’t think it’s hard work having to fuck you every night?”

  Still, there were appearances to be maintained, and neither Bogarde nor Visconti wanted the press to report that they were turning the story of a middle-aged man’s obsession with a young boy into anything having to do with homosexuality.

  Both men took extraordinary precautions to at least certify the young Andrésen’s Swedish red-bloodedness. As Bogarde described him, the teenager possessed a “healthy appetite for bubble gum, rock ’n’ roll, fast motorbikes, and the darting-eyed girls whom he met, tightly jeaned, ruby lips, playing the pin-tables in the local Hotel Baron the Lido.”

  While Visconti asked Bogarde to read the Mann novel sixty times, he asked Andrésen to treat the book as he would any other twentieth-century classic of literature—and avoid it. Andrésen, however, was curious, and during one of his pin-table breaks on the Lido, he took a quick flip through Death in Venice. Andrésen promptly reported back to Bogarde, in his best American-ese slang, saying, “Hell, man, now I know who I am, I’m the Angel of Death, right?”

  Bogarde nodded yes. He was an angel. Or something like that.

  WARNER BROS., UNDER OLD management and new, had this habit of green-lighting movies, like Performance and The Damned and Death in Venice and The Devils, that its executives would later, in the harsh darkness of the screening room, find shockingly uncommercial. Of all those films, it is safe to say that Ted Ashley and his Warners gang were most shocked by Ken Russell’s The Devils.

  It was an eventful shoot.

  After having to wrestle Alan Bates in the nude, in Women in Love, Oliver Reed had it easy in The Devils. He did, however, balk at one bit of business—shaving his head as well as his eyebrows for the big auto-da-fé scene. Fighting naked or losing his hair was one thing. But shaving his eyebrows?

  “Of course it’s important,” Russell told him. “They shaved off all of Grandier’s bodily hair and then stuck red hot pokers up his arse.” Realizing that it could be worse, Reed consented to the full-head shave but demanded a Lloyd’s of London contract for half a million pounds to ensure that his luscious brows grew back in toto.

  Vanessa Redgrave, taking over for Glenda Jackson, had never been told about Sister Jeanne’s head in a box, and gladly accepted Russell’s invitation to play the role as written. His script offered quite enough to activate her theatrical imagination: There was the nun’s wet dream in which she imagines herself as Mary Magdalene at the crucifixion, in which Jesus Christ miraculously morphs into Grandier and she gets to not only wipe his feet clean with her long hair but passionately kiss him and roll around on the ground in his tight embrace. Her character is also administered hot, scalding enemas to rid her of the devil, and at the movie’s end, instead of her head in a box, she masturbates with Grandier’s burnt tibia, a “souvenir,” she is told, of his execution at the stake.

  “It’s a very terrifying sequence,” the actress said of the movie’s penultimate scene, “a pitiful fact that Sister Jeanne took that bone and was fucking herself with it. I thought it expressed in the most pitiful way the depths of her depravity and her need for humanity.”

  Unlike Jackson, who always acted at least one scene in the nude in Ken Russell’s movies, Redgrave performed the masturbation fully clothed. As David Watkin’s camera recorded it, the actress is not shown doing anything with the bone, shaped to look like a blackened cock and balls. Rather, the camera leaves the tibia in her hand to instead rest on the actress’s suddenly ecstatic face.

  Elsewhere, Russell and Watkin left much less to the imagination. Prior to filming, actresses who signed on to play the movie’s many demented nuns were sent photocopies of a book titled The Dictionary of Witchcraft, which included descriptions of how the nuns at Loudun really behaved during and after Sister Jeanne’s exorcism. Reportedly, it was a very well-publicized event that sent the nuns into a bizarre frenzy, the kind that attracted curiosity seekers from all over France.

  Regarding this witches’ tome, actress Judith Paris revealed, “It described how they tore off their clothes, how they went screaming into the crowds, how they bent over in hopes of exposing their genitalia.” Paris thought to herself, “I can’t do this.” An obliging director, Russell kept the actress fully clothed in a nun’s habit as she stuck a big candle between her legs and relentlessly stroked it.

  Other actresses were less squeamish about appearing naked. They, too, had been warned.

  “When we were sent the script, all the nuns were told to read specific scenes, and if they weren’t prepared to do what the scenes described quite graphically they shouldn’t accept the job,” said Imogen Claire, who played an extra in The Devils.

  In one scene, before the big exorcism, Vanessa Redgrave’s character unsuccessfully attempts suicide by hanging herself from a tree. The shoot took place in the rain on the back lot at London’s Pinewood Studios, and the actresses playing nuns were directed to run round and round the tree. Ken Russell took a hair dryer and handed it to one of the other actors, Dudley Sutton.

  “Warm their tits
when they come off,” Russell instructed Sutton, who played archvillain Baron de Laubardemont.

  “They were grateful,” said Sutton.

  Sutton, too, was grateful, since Russell had been careful not to cast old or overweight actresses but rather women suitable for a “Sexy Sisters of Loudun” pictorial in Playboy.

  Blow-dried or hand-toweled, running around a tree in the cold rain was nun’s play compared to performing in the scene that came to be known as “The Rape of Christ.” Russell’s intention was to shoot scenes of Father Grandier at a lake, taking a communion of bread and wine, and intercut those shots of simple holiness with the nuns’ “absolute blasphemy of their religion,” which included their dismantling a life-sized crucifix and using its nailed feet and hands, among other appendages, to masturbate.

  It was a tough shoot. “Some of the younger girls got upset. With all that frenzy . . . some of the men extras got carried away and a couple [of actresses] came out crying,” said Lee Fyles, an extra in the scene.

  “Girls who were naked didn’t enjoy moving amongst the extras. That wasn’t a comfortable thing to do,” said actress Selena Gilbert.

  Associate producer Roy Baird confirmed that the scene provoked “one or two complaints. But they were fabulous, these girls.”

  Russell was a bit more sympathetic. “They were very bad in the exterior shots,” he said of the male extras, “and in some of the cathedral scenes, they manhandled the naked nuns more than was called for, and one poor girl was even sexually assaulted.” According to the director, the extras’ union made an effort to correct things “after the fuss on The Devils.”

  But the damage had been done. “It got into the press that there were orgies,” said Vernon. Dudley Sutton recalled how crews on other film productions at Pinewood took out their saws and pocket knives to create peepholes in the set of The Devils. As a result, there were many leaks to the press about the lurid goings-on at the studio. “I had a dancer friend who came in at the end of the film. She said it was terrible, chaotic. That was Ken’s whole point, a community gone berserk,” said Vernon.