Famous for 15 Minutes

by Ultra Violet

  Martin Luther King articulates the dream of a beleaguered black population. The South erupts in protest and counterprotest, urban ghettos burn, campuses explode, women find their voices. Change breaks out on every front—sex, race, music, youth, religion, politics, dress, art.

  Rock music and folk songs hasten the rhythm of change. Joan Baez and Bob Dylan popularize the song of protest. The Beatles ensnare the whole nation. The age of Aquarius dawns, to peak at the end of the decade, in 1969, when 400,000 young people in jeans, feathers, beads, flowers gather for three days of rock, blues, dance, alcohol, pot, protest, nudity, and love.

  Alone and far from home, hippie kids vibrate to the new music on the sidewalks and park benches of New York’s East Village, where the sound of Warhol’s rock group, the Velvet Underground, bellows out of the Dom, his unholy multimedia cathedral of rock music, psychedelic lights, and hallucinating drugs.

  The Velvet Underground plays so loud you never hear the music. Andy first ran into them at a downtown club. He offers the standard invitation: “Why don’t you come by tomorrow?” They show up at the Factory, more spaced out than anyone in our crowd. They’re all thin, dressed in black, and they look as if their only food is amphetamine wafers.

  Andy signs them for a week at the Cinematheque, to play while Andy’s films are being shown. It’s like the old days at the silent pictures. Some of our pictures are silent and on some the sound is so poor that anything that covers it is an improvement. When you come out of the movie house, your head echoes for days and you have trouble hearing anything but an ambulance. The Velvet has already played backup and made tapes for other filmmakers. But Andy blows up the idea bigger, better, and louder by having the musicians play live on stage while the movie is being shown.

  The Velvet, with its name changed to the Plastic Inevitable Plus Nico, opens in April 1966 at the Dom on St. Mark’s Place, which Andy is running as a club, screening room, and hot spot. John Cale composes songs and plays the electric viola. He has had classical training and is very innovative. Lou Reed is the guitarist and songwriter. Mo, short for Maureen, is a girl drummer, a first at that time. She has a look of total innocence.

  Nico, the singer, has a unisex, atonal voice. She looks like a girl, with long blond hair, a well-designed, pretty mouth, high cheekbones, long lashes, and pale, luminescent makeup. But when she sings, it’s hard to be sure of her sex. You’re not even sure if she’s singing, so little life comes out of her mouth. Still as a statue, she repeats in a low, low register, in a strong German accent, words you cannot comprehend because of the loudness of the band.

  When you go to the Dom on St. Mark’s Place in the Village, you step into a magical cave. Long lines of limousines form outside. If you don’t have a limo, you may as well skip it. Everybody mixes together: art people, society people, film people, drag queens, druggies, voyeurs, tourists, rock freaks, kids, kids, kids—a potpourri, which in French means rotten pot.

  The decibels are so deafening that talking is out of the question. That’s why Andy loves it so much. On the stage, we project our movies through various colored gelatins to make the image all blue or all red. Andy has trouble telling the gels apart. Sometimes Gerard Malanga does his provocative improvised sadomasochistic whip dance. He is so clumsy I am embarrassed. Mary Woronov, a great-looking, tall woman, jumps onstage, jiggles, stares menacingly, shows her teeth. The kids scream on and on. The music overrides the screams, so the kids scream still louder and louder.

  Andy and I watch the whole scene from the balcony. Ingrid Superstar and Eric jump onstage to dance. The sound of the whip cracking on someone’s back is amplified with a mike; so is the stomping of black leather boots, and the rattling of chains to the rhythm of drums and tambourines. To add to the vision of hell, strobe lights, the first in town, assault your sight, making you blink eighty times in thirty seconds. Swirling patterns of dots and stars carry you away to a phantasmagorical landscape.

  Ondine, the Queen of Drugs, and Brigid, the Duchess, patrol the crowd and shoot up anyone who offers a hip or an arm. There’s a choice of amphetamine, LSD, acid, home-made speed, Methedrine, Obetrol, Desoxyn, heroin, and Placidyl. Desoxyn is the most expensive. Drug addicts in a hurry get poked right through their pants or jeans. It takes someone with a good technique to be able to shoot through jeans. The stabbing of the needle has to be assertive, no halfway poking. Ondine’s hand has a tendency to shake, but practice makes perfect. One time, Ondine punctures an artery, and his jetting blood hits a light, projecting gore onto the screen. The kids love it.

  Life was cheap in the sixties, as it always is in time of war, whether Vietnam or the Drug Holocaust. Uncle Sam ships off his sons to Deathland to be blown asunder by grenades; in clumsy brotherhood in the motherland, the kids left behind blow their minds asunder.

  But it’s not for me. I remember my terrible experience with LSD two years earlier. In the hotel suite of European friends in New York, someone slipped LSD in a goblet of red wine the hostess was passing around. Though I took only a sip, the acid exploded in my head, bringing on such screaming hallucinations that I was taken to Lenox Hill Hospital, medicated, and kept in the emergency room for several hours. Violent disorientation and distortion of vision continued for nearly two days. I decided once again that my body was unusually sensitive to drugs.

  The revolution we are living is visible in the clothes of the Dom’s patrons. Some are more undressed than dressed. A guy in thigh boots sweeps the floor with his long coat. He looks like a Nazi. Andy tells me, “He’s just wearing a G-string under the coat.” Two girls go by. One wears a huge antique hat heaped with feathers, an Edwardian blouse laced to her neck, a full skirt to the floor, gloves covering every inch of her arm. The other, in a striped mini, has a tiny star covering each nipple. The designer Rudi Gernreich comes to the Dom, watches the teenagers, then the next summer produces the completely topless bathing suit. Other designers bare the other end.

  The Velvet Underground is doing with music what Andy is doing with images. They repeat and repeat and repeat the same word or phrase until someone screams out, “Shut up!” Lou records a song, “Do the Ostrich.” Those are the entire lyrics. He screams the words over and over until the director of the recording session makes him stop.

  Minimal music echoes minimal art.

  The early reviews put down the Velvet. Critics call them antisocial, vicious. Their sound is raucous, harsh, coarse, raw, like the grinding of stones. “They are too far out for most people,” Andy says, “but they’re fabulous.” Andy, as usual, is right, because their style is the precursor of what later is called punk and heavy metal, and for years to come the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, David Byrne and the Talking Heads, and many lesser groups will be influenced by the Velvet Underground.

  The Velvet is the first group to do feedback—tape the music while it’s played, then play against their own tape. It’s exciting for the musicians and cranium-splitting for the audience. Sometimes we run one film on top of another so there is more to watch and two sets of images to further excite the brain.

  At the Dom, Andy and I and some of the others have a marvelous time playing with the lights. When you hold a spotlight in your hand, you’re part of the show. You’re rocking with the music. We are hypnotized by the lights; the musicians do the same with their music. Cameras are flashing, the movie is going, sometimes piggybacked, one on top of another, the sound is blasting, the lights are pulsating. If your mind hasn’t already blown, it certainly will soon.

  The amazing thing is that while Andy doesn’t seem to be doing much more than hanging out, somehow he assembles all these people, figures out what they should be doing, pushes them to perform beyond their normal ability, devises new ways to augment the sound, intensify the visual impact, and heighten the frenzy.

  Lou Reed says, “Andy works all the time. He seems to just stand around while others work, but he’s the mastermind behind all of us.”

  I am fascinated by Nico. I see her as Andy incarnated i
nto a singer. She is as lifeless as he is, although I once saw her shed slow tears while singing at the Dom. I traveled with her to San Francisco for the filming of segments of I a Man, in which we both played ourselves. Although we shared the same room, I never had a conversation with her. She has a darling four-year-old son, Ari, who is having the best time of us all. When she and Andy first meet, neither knows what to say. They just stand there and feel each other’s vibes.

  A conversation between them goes like this:

  Nico: “Hi, Andy.”

  Andy: “Oh, hi.”

  Silence. After a while, Nico: “Andy.”

  Andy: “Hmmm.”

  Nico: “I …” Silence.

  Andy: “What?”

  Nico: “I … thought …” Silence.

  Andy: “What?”

  Nico: “… thought you …”

  All the while, Andy is flipping through the pages of the current Time magazine.

  Andy: “What were you saying, Nico?”

  Nico: “Nothing.”

  What Nico is trying to tell Andy and eventually does tell him the next day is that she would like him to design the cover for the album she is doing for Elektra Records. He never does, but sometime later he autographs a color Polaroid he took of me with an apple stuck in my mouth, which illustrates the cover of the album I make for Capitol Records.

  Nico is the girl on whom Andy silk-screens the word FRAGILE in a window happening at the Abraham and Straus department store in Brooklyn. It’s a promotion to sell a two-dollar paper dress with a do-it-yourself paint kit. It turns out to be a do-it-yourself promotion for Andy.

  A hundred spectators gather inside the store and outside. Gerard, dressed in baggy leather pants, holds a metal frame that contains the silk screen, while Andy pours reddish-purple paint through it. The crowd giggles. Little Ari sprays spinach-green paint on his mother’s stockings. Nico reclines on a platform as the word FRAGILE is printed repetitiously on the front of her dress from the hip down. On the loudspeaker, Nico’s monotonous voice is barely audible against the amplified guitars and male voices. She’s singing “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” A matronly woman in the crowd scratches at her ear in a vain effort to clear up the sound.

  Andy grimaces with pain when a microphone is placed in front of him and he is required to speak. Faintly he says, “Nico is the first psychedelic singer with the Velvet Underground. They do two hours of songs with only buzzing from a burglar alarm in between.” The spectators look baffled. The matronly woman scratches her ear again. Shyly Andy takes out of the pocket of his leather jacket some larger-than-life stick-on paper bananas and pastes them on Nico’s dress.

  A thin woman calls out, “I thought he was going to paint something by hand. That’s what I came for.”

  A store employee takes the mike: “It’s to show you how you can do it yourself. The dress Mr. Warhol has just executed will be donated to the Brooklyn Museum of Art.”

  The crowd looks disappointed. Two-dollar paper dresses are not about to sweep the world, but Andy does take one home to his mother.

  The Velvet Underground has a moment of peculiar triumph when it plays at the Delmonico Hotel for the annual dinner of the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry. Dr. Robert Campbell, chairman of the dinner and director of the psychiatric unit at St. Vincent’s Hospital, has invited Andy and the Underground to give some shock treatment to the 175 well-dressed shrinks and their perfumed, carefully coiffed wives. Over roast beef, the doctors are bombarded by the decibels of three fire engines and blinded by stun-gun lights. Gerard does his whip dance. Edie shakes her butt. Four Freudians and one Jungian walk out, needing first aid for their eyes and ears. One Fifth Avenue practitioner regurgitates his roast beef, and several analysts are heard making appointments with each other for the next day.

  UNDERGROUND HOLLYWOOD

  The movie is the logical development of Andy’s art. The canvas, the silk screen, the photograph are not enough for him. They provide a static image: They do not move. He wants more. He wants to see the image explode into action. He begins with very simple one-reel movies in black and white. He moves on to three reels, later to color, sound, longer films. The movies are always experimental and often innovative. They look for juxtapositions. The early movies have no plots, very little story. There is no editing—the action takes place in real time. A fifteen-minute movie takes fifteen minutes to make and to play to the audience. Most are spontaneous. The actors make up their own dialogue in catch-as-catch-can takes of daily life.

  The actors are people around the Factory, kids who drop in, underground actors, preferably nonstop talkers, amphetamine heads who can’t shut up. Anyone who appears in a movie is automatically a Star. Make two movies and you are a Superstar.

  No one on earth can resist starring in a movie. Andy uses this bait to haul in the fish. He meets a pretty girl and says, “You’re so beautiful—would you like to be in a movie?” He meets a pretty boy and says, “You look great—would you like to be in a movie?” He meets a rich society matron and shrewdly changes pitch: “We need a fabulous apartment for our next movie—could we use your place?” They all, or very nearly all, say yes.

  All through the sixties, his circle enlarges; the Factory becomes a magnet, attracting more and more people. The more movies he makes, the more money he needs, the greater the frenzy and excitement. The loft is jumping. The Stars and Superstars are jumping. The whole world wants to explode with us. It is a fabulous, mind-bending time.

  I am at the center of it, flying in and out of Andy’s world and my other worlds. I spend time with Dali, see Mr. XYZ, go to cocktail parties and charity balls with my European friends, travel back and forth to Europe, and design my ultra violet wardrobe. I live every day to the hilt and beyond, stimulated, euphoric, on my steadily mounting natural high.

  I try to figure out what makes Andy so attractive to me, to all of us, for we are drawn to him in an almost supernatural way. Part of his appeal is his uncanny ability to concentrate on you and convey the feeling that at that particular moment you are the only person in the entire universe. When he speaks to me, he makes me feel I am the one and only person he takes advice from, the only one who has the answers to his questions, the only one he wants to be with. Even after I become aware that he treats dozens, maybe hundreds, of people with that same compelling immediacy, I still feel its power.

  Another part of his appeal derives from his enigmatic quality. He is enigmatic to the point of making me wonder sometimes if he is alive or dead, if he is really a fellow earthling or a weird creature from outer space, if he is a fool or a genius. He acts like an idiot when he says repetitiously, “I don’t know what to do; everything is so hard.” Yet he is clearly in charge of a complex, many-sided operation dealing in art, music, movies, and hype, and he is able to command without pay the loyalty and services of scores of talented, creative, if sometimes crazed, people.

  Finally there is his art itself and his place in art history. Art is my form of worship at this point in my life. Andy’s art is a far cry from that of both the old and the modern masters—the Raphaels and the Légers—yet it has its own special beauty and power. With his silk screens, his multiples, his grocery shelf subjects, his crayon box colors, his deliberately flat surfaces, his insistence on taking the mystery out of art, he is creating a new aesthetic. And I am, we are, right here in his atelier as he shakes up established values in the visual arts.

  I am thrilled to be part of that show. I feel wonderfully liberated among the iconoclasts around him, for we are all equal—there are no saints, no sinners among us, no one is making judgments. We are free to be our worst selves or our best selves. And if that weren’t joy enough, we are in the movies!

  Ironically, the early movies are stupefyingly static. Empire State Building shows the Empire State Building, with the camera substituting for the artist’s brush strokes. It is not a tour through the building or a history of its construction. It is a picture postcard of the building transferred to
the screen. Kiss is a kiss. Taylor Mead’s Ass is precisely that. There’s not much more action in Vinyl, Apple, Nude Restaurant.

  We screen Sleep, made the week before—fifteen minutes, black and white, eight millimeter. The sleeper sleeps. That’s all. The only sign of life is a pressure point at the throat, which pulsates. Otherwise this could be a film about death. Is not death an extended sleep? The movie is a sleep inducer. Eric and Ondine fall asleep, and so do I. Of course, we are all short of sleep. Ondine is going on his sixth day without sleep. Before I fall asleep I look at Andy. It’s hard to tell whether he is asleep behind his dark glasses. He is always in a state of limbo—always between reality and dream.

  The press calls the movie “a real sleeper.” We all agree. Our movies are better slept through than talked about. It is a much bigger event for me in 1966 when a movie, or part of one, is shot in my apartment. We are making a movie to be called 24 Hours, which will last for twenty-four hours on the screen. This one, at least, will have some action. Parts of it are being shot in various locales. Right now we are lounging around the Factory, deciding where to shoot next.

  Andy is talking on the pay phone. He says, “Fame is when you market your aura.” I have heard him say this before. Most of us are sucking on gum. Andy is sucking a magnet. How do I know? I offer him some gum, and he says, “Wait a minute,” and spits out a tiny piece of dark gray metal.

  “What’s that?” I want to know.

  “A magnet.”

  I don’t question him any further. I figure it’s to augment his magnetism.

  Paul Morrissey decides to shoot that night at my apartment. I am living at the moment at 860 United Nations Plaza, the tall, handsome, just completed building on the East River north of the United Nations, which houses many well-known tenants.