Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  Andy lures me to the Factory with the promise of putting me in a movie. I soon discover he makes about fifteen such promises every day. It’s his way of opening a conversation. His movies, I also learn, are quickie underground movies, shot in shaky black and white with a single hand-held camera; the action on the screen takes as long as the action in real life. Everything about the production is rankly amateur. But his friends, followers, and members of the “in” public who want to be shocked with nudity, homosexual sex, and anything outrageous flock to tiny underground screening rooms to see these films.

  Andy tells me I need a new name. I can’t use Isabelle Collin Dufresne. No one can spell it, pronounce it, or remember it. Besides, the stars of his underground films have catchy names—International Velvet, Ingrid Superstar, Ondine. He suggests Poly Ester or Notre Dame for me. I tell him I’ll find my own name.

  While reading an article on light and space in Time magazine, I come across the words “ultra violet.” They leap at me. I cut them out with the gold scissors I use to cut the split ends of my hair.

  I say the name out loud several times: “Ultra Violet, Ultra Violet.” I stretch it out, pronounce it in five distinct syllables. I emphatically prolong each vowel. I tap the tip of my tongue forcibly against my teeth to give the consonants a staccato sound. It comes out: Ul—tra—vi—o—let. By luck or by choice, my name contains the five magical vowels. Vowels shine as jewels compared to the dull consonants. Vowels are the coloratura, the very hue of language.

  Repeating my new name evokes dreams of verbal alchemy. I shake hands in poetic fervor with that thief of fire Arthur Rimbaud. The legendary poet, fed on revolt just as I am, feasted in his “Sonnet des Voyelles” on the color of each vowel: “A Black, E White, I Red, O Blue, U Green.” Yes, my friend Arthur, my name is colorful. Even you would approve it. I anoint myself Ste. Ultra Violet. I speak my new gospel: “And God created vowels, and men gave name to the consonants.” I am drunk with delight.

  I announce to Dali my choice for a born-anew name. He is not exactly sure about it. It sounds a little too scientific to him. He thinks I need something more romantic, more classical. He wants to rebaptize me Isabeau, which is neither male nor female. He often calls me Isabeau de Bavière. I repeat “Ultra Violet,” drawing out the vowels into an exaggerated aria. This time he laughs. Now he approves.

  Andy thinks Ultra Violet is really funny. “It will be an ear-catcher,” he says.

  Once I adopt my nom de plume, or better yet, nom de guerre, I have to live up to it. My first aim is to upstage all the other Superstars. It is not my nature to be one of a crowd. I must stand out. My name gives me a head start. I can be ultra anything. But first, of course, I have to begin with the color. That means my collection of dark brown wigs, which I wear to dramatize certain outfits or to substitute for a trip to the hairdresser, is turned over to a theatrical beautician, who dyes them various shades of violet. I mean violet—not modestly lilac or sweetly mauve. Violet. You can’t miss me in a mob.

  In my fanaticism about health—I’d rather drink carrot juice than wine—I always try to avoid chemical cosmetics and seek out edible items to use on my skin and hair. Through the years, I’ve broken and scrambled dozens of eggs over my head for shampoo, added a dash of rum to camouflage the egg aroma, and squeezed on lemon juice as a natural rinse to achieve a high shine. Now I fill the sink with violets, run hot water over them, boil them, squeeze them, all but stamp on them, but to no avail. I cannot coax out of the petals a convincing violet tint. I make a foray to the greengrocer’s and come home with samples of purple broccoli, dark red grapes, beets, cranberries, red plums—anything that has a red-purple hue. Then I experiment.

  Cranberry juice or liquid cranberry jelly proves most satisfactory on my hair. It gives a vibrant red sheen to my dark brown hair, which I wear loose and wild. I wash it in the red juice, shake it out to dry, never let a comb near it, and glory in my snaky ringlets, untamed by human hands. Using fresh beets on my cheeks and lips, I achieve an alive transparent tint.

  To renew my lip color during an evening I pull out of my gold mesh evening purse a gigantic fresh beet with the green leaves still dangling on their red stems. With a tiny gold knife I slice a morsel from the beet and rub it on my lips and cheeks in full view of the staring onlookers. The shade it imparts is neither red nor pink nor orange but an out-of-this-world rouge-violet. Try it sometime. I take the beet and the leaves home and eat them the next day. And more than once, when there is a long wait between meals, I head off starvation by nibbling a few mouthfuls of the white rice powder that I dust on my face from a beautiful cloisonné compact.

  For my eyes, I forgo the natural approach and buy false lashes by the yard. I glue a four-inch strip on my upper and lower lids, letting it run all the way back to my hairline, as if the lashes were born out of my corkscrew hair. With my centipede eyes, I conquer hundreds of hearts. And on rainy days, when the dampness turns my Medusa locks into a huge ostrich feather duster, I enhance the effect by wearing white ostrich feathers in my hair. At the Parke Bernet Gallery, Seventy-sixth Street and Madison Avenue, at a showing of the paintings of Nicolas de Staël, which is accompanied by a piano recital of Chopin ballades by Philippe Entremont, my extravagant horsetail plumage catches the eye of a New York Times reporter and results in a beautiful photo of me in the Sunday paper.

  Naturally, my wardrobe needs to be violet as well. Andy takes me to a thrift shop on St. Mark’s Place, the street where the flower children acquire their poetic gear and where the fad of ransacking attics for the finery of yesteryear is getting its biggest impetus. Old clothes from the 1930s and ’40s are piled high on makeshift counters, some of the items beautiful, and some just funky. I select a vintage dress in violet velvet, priced at ten dollars, and try it on. I pirouette in front of Andy. He nods his approval. “Buy it,” he says.

  “It’s great,” I tell him, “but look, it’s torn at the bottom.” I lift the hem to show him the ragged area.

  “That’s the torn look,” he declares—and a new fashion is born. As I come out of the store, resplendent in dated violet velvet, shredded around the edges, all heads turn toward me, and three cars hit their brakes with loud squeals as the drivers fix their eyes on the torn look instead of the red light.

  You must remember that this is the early ’60s, and most people still dress in staid and conventional ways; only a few daring souls show up in public in outfits usually reserved for masquerade balls. When I look in the mirror, I am electrified by my own image. I feel as if I’ve plugged my fingers into an electrical outlet. As Ultra Violet, I can feel the jolt of the volts coursing through me.

  When I march into Dali’s apartment in my violet finery, he offers me a box of candied violets, real violets, dipped in sugar that takes on a violet aura, and a box of chocolate ants, real ants, embalmed in chocolate.

  I hesitate to pluck a flower from the field of boxed violets. I feel like a cannibal eating my own kind. But I delicately pick one—it is delicious. The chocolate ants are something else. They are Dali’s signature—I always tell him they must be the ants that crawl over the watch in his most famous of paintings, The Persistence of Memory. I know I am expected to eat at least a few of the ants, so I bravely put one in my mouth and listen to it crackle between my teeth. I have difficulty swallowing it. I imagine the little creature pushing its legs backward in my throat to avoid its fate. It finally goes down. Its friends in the box—there are an awful lot of them—I will offer to my friends to test their daring.

  Soon people send me violets for every occasion. Bouquets of them come from known and unknown admirers. I keep them all. When they dry, I tape them to the frame of my front door. Their color turns to dark amber-rose with streaks of mauve. The door becomes a magnificent floral archway. It’s the closest I get to nature in New York City.

  More and more I identify with the violet. I surround myself with the odor of violets. I blend violet essence with a drop of patchouli or rose geranium to make the
violet scent more intriguing. When I was a child, my mother treated my sore throats and other illnesses with herbal medicines. Back then I read endlessly in her herbal books about the properties of plants. Now I wonder if she ever soothed my childhood illnesses with violets or dosed me with violet infusions.

  I go to the library and pull down a copy of Culpeper’s Complete Herbal. I read that the violet “eases pains in the head, caused through want of sleep. A dram weight of the dried leaves or flowers purges the body of choleric humors, if taken in a draught of wine. The herbs or flowers are effectual in the pleurisy and all diseases of the lungs, hoarseness of the throat, pains of the back and bladder.”

  Clearly, I am a cure-all.

  But beyond the pharmacopoeia, the violet has a remarkable effect on me. It releases me. Deep inside, I am both daring and timid. I love to smash rules, to amaze, to shock. But at the same time, I am often shy. I hesitate to speak up in a crowd. I rarely argue with people. This conflict between bravura and reticence persists all my life. I feel a duality in my nature.

  Ultra Violet becomes the unleashed exhibitionist, the mad, heedless creature, chasing headlines, totally uninhibited (most of the time), an unabashed freak. She will do anything. At a party in Los Angeles in honor of David Bowie and me, I hold a press conference, reclining in Eve’s outfit, my body totally immersed in a bath of milk. That’s Ultra in the milk bath, not Isabelle. Ultra adores the provocation of being naked, yet not visibly nude to the naked eye.

  Andy and I are invited to the opening of a Twentieth Century—Fox film. We both want to look smashing, because we are searching for money to produce our films. Andy says, “Wear what makes you look best.”

  I reply, “I look best with no clothes on.”

  “So wear nothing under your coat.”

  That’s what I do. But even as Ultra, I dare not check my coat.

  Unlike ultra violet light, which is beyond the spectrum and therefore invisible, I am visible but beyond the permissible, with my Egyptian wildcat makeup, my tousled hair, and my provocative attitude. I hear of an Ultra Violet cult. In the street I see a mushrooming of Ultra Violets. In Italy an artist proposes a shrine to Santa Ultra Violetta.

  Ultra will do anything for publicity. In his 1980 book, Popism, Andy states: “Ultra was popular with the press because she had a freak name, purple hair, an incredibly long tongue and a mini-rap about the intellectual meaning of underground movies. She’d go on talk shows ‘representing the underground,’ and it was hilarious because she was as big a mystery to us as she was to everybody else. She’d tell journalists, ‘I collect art and love.’ But what she really collected were press clippings.”

  Ultra becomes so famous that in time she nearly obliterates Isabelle. In 1968 my Turkish friend Ahmet Ertegun, who, with his brother, founded Atlantic Records, the foremost recorder of rock groups, picks me up in his antique limousine, a special carrosserie Rolls-Royce. Ahmet is as striking in appearance as his car. He has a shining, hairless head and a dark, triangular goatee. His car is midnight brown, vintage 1959. I’m astonished at the beauty of the automobile. “It’s nothing special, just a stock limousine,” Ahmet tells me.

  “That’s hard to believe,” I say as I admire the inlaid-wood bar, the velvety beige upholstery, as comfortable as a luxurious down couch. The front seat is leather—to withstand constant use by the driver. Ahmet introduces me to Prince Rupert Loewinstein, another prince without a principality. We drive to dine at the home of Betsy Bloomingdale, of the Bloomingdale chain of stores and the Diners Club, and a dear friend of Nancy Reagan, at that time the First Lady of California.

  Ahmet, who knows me in both my incarnations, introduces me as Isabelle Collin Dufresne. I am dressed as Isabelle, in a conservative black dinner dress, elegantly understated, my hair braided in a chignon. At the dinner I am seated next to George Plimpton. At the height of the animated conversation, Betsy’s voice rises over the others, and the guests around the small tables lean forward to hear her story.

  “Guess who I saw today at Café Figaro,” Betsy says. “I saw Ultra Violet.”

  There are oohs and ahhs. Betsy goes on: “She was unbelievable. Her hair was violet and”—her gesture extends the width of an umbrella—“was like a wild nest for a huge jungle bird. Her eyes”—she points to a purple orchid in the floral arrangement—“were wilder than this orchid. Her clothes were torn, and you could see pieces of her skin underneath. She was covered with gold chains and gold medals and gold coins, and as she walked she jingled. She …”

  This is going too far. Ahmet tries to break in to explain. But Betsy keeps right on. “I tell you, she was bizarre. She kept being paged, and each time they called her name, all the heads turned to watch her untamed walk.”

  Now I speak up. “Betsy, I am Ultra. I—”

  She thinks this is a wonderful joke and continues to describe my extravagant appearance. I try again to get a word in. Then I give up. She is my hostess. I really shouldn’t ruin her story. Ahmet is rolling his eyes and suppressing his laughter. Later, we laugh all the way home in his Rolls.

  In the 1980s the Ultra/Isabelle confusion surfaces again. I am driving to New Jersey in the company of Philippe de Boissieu, the nephew of French President Giscard d’Estaing. I am to interview Michael, a gentleman farmer and owner of two cows, on behalf of Stuart Mott, an heir to the General Motors fortune, who maintains a suspended Babylonian urban organic farm on the terrace of his Park Avenue penthouse. All that is missing in his Garden of Eden are the passengers from Noah’s Ark. Michael wants to sell Mott the cows.

  I fall in love with the cows at first sight, but I know they will never pass the stuffy board of Mott’s building. I begin speaking with Michael, who mentions that in town he lives on East Sixty-sixth Street, next to Warhol’s town house, and knows the whole entourage.

  “Whom do you know?” I ask.

  “Andy, all those girls, Viva, Ultra Violet.”

  I say, “Ultra Violet, how is she?”

  “Oh, she’s dead.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Probably an overdose.”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Oh, she was beautiful, a sex kitten, like a more beautiful Hedy Lamarr. She was Andy’s favorite. She represented him on TV.”

  I say no more. Later, to spare Michael future embarrassment, Philippe tells him that the woman to whom he described Ultra Violet is the real, genuine Ultra Violet herself. Michael rejects the idea. He thinks it’s ridiculous. Maybe he’s right, because by that time—by the 1980s—Ultra Violet is no longer the girl in Andy Warhol’s soup, and Isabelle, the grateful survivor of the sixties, has become a person so different, so reincarnated, she is almost unrecognizable.

  POP ART

  I actually meet Andy Warhol before I know his name and before our introduction by Dali. In 1961 I sit at the counter of a luncheonette at Eighty-eighth Street and Madison Avenue, next to a blondish young man. He has a childlike face but an unearthly pallor. I read the menu disapprovingly. I still hate New York food. Back in France, I was upset at the French obsession with food. I railed against two-hour lunches and three-hour dinners and endless, boring talk about flavors, ingredients, vintages, taste nuances. Life had to hold more meaning than the silkiness of a sauce.

  Not until I get to New York and sample its tasteless fare do I forgive my countrymen. Here, the eggs do not taste like eggs. Butter does not taste like butter. Tomatoes taste like the packages they come in. I must say that in the intervening years, American food has improved enormously. But then I was justifiably full of scorn. At the luncheonette counter, I rattle the menu in annoyance and start a one-sided conversation with the ghostly young man on the stool next to me. “Gastronomy is foreign to Americans,” I say.

  He nods.

  “What are you eating?” I ask.

  “Chicken soup.”

  I order a tuna fish sandwich. When it comes, I glare at the limp white bread and the puddle of mayonnaise. I ask the young man what he does. �
��I’m a painter.”

  “I paint too. What do you paint?”

  “Not much. I’m looking for ideas.”

  I point to the Campbell soup cans arrayed neatly on the shelf. “Why don’t you paint a soup can?” I ask idly. The words just come out. But as I say them, I think that’s what Americans deserve, a boring, banal can of soup.

  “Hmmm,” my countermate says.

  I am not aware that the stranger next to me has already painted a can of Del Monte peaches and that his own momentum is about to lead him to soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, dollar bills, and postage stamps, with or without my prompting. I don’t see him again until Salvador Dali introduces him to me, saying, “I’d like to present Andy Warhol.”

  In the Factory, Andy always works with loud rock music on. In rock, repetition is the leitmotiv. Not only does the rhythm, led by the drum, a replica of the heartbeat, pound at regular measures, but the other instruments create melody in a repetitive cadenza. Andy does not hesitate to repeat himself. He paints forty-eight Marilyns and two hundred twenty-four Campbell soup cans, and in the movie Sleep, the sleeper sleeps, sleeps, sleeps, sleeps, sleeps, sleeps until the viewer nods off.

  But Andy never really paints a painting. In his own words, he does a painting. One day in 1964 we are sitting on the broken-down couch in the Factory. Andy, as always, pretends to be short of ideas. “What shall I do?” he asks.

  “A painting.”

  “What subject?”

  Piles of silk screens are stacked along the west wall of the loft. I spot a large screen, about six feet by twelve feet, that depicts in dark ink the background of two flowers side by side, each about six feet in diameter, one larger than the other, and barely touching. We unroll on the floor some virgin canvas, on top of which we lay the flower stencil.

  “What color?” he asks.

  “Make it violet, since that’s my name and I’m a flower myself.”

  Using a can opener, he lifts the top of a gallon can of deep violet Benjamin Moore paint. He adds a dollop of white and with a roller, applies it to the screen over one of the flowers.